I’ve been writing about cycling for 30 years and over that time I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the exploits of bike racers in the mountains and, above all, by this magnificent terrain itself. This ultimately led to my family leaving our home in the north of England and moving to the French Pyrenees, to a tiny hamlet that’s close to nowhere but is surrounded by mountains, where we can walk and ride endlessly through stunning countryside. I may not be French, but this is where I feel most at home.
I did a short promotional book tour with Max and was enthralled by his descriptions of road cycling’s obsession with the mountains.
I read his book subsequently and was equally captivated, particularly by his travels in remote areas of the southern French Alps and on Bonette-Restefond pass, the highest road pass in Europe.
Why do road cyclists go to the mountains? Many books tell you where the mountains are, or how long and how high. None of them ask 'Why?'
After all, cycling up a mountain is hard - so hard that, to many non-cyclists, it can seem absurd. But, for some, climbing a mountain gracefully (and beating your competitors up the slope) represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. The mountains are where legends are forged and cycling's greats make their names.
Why are Europe's mountain ranges professional cycling's Wembley Stadium or its Colosseum? Why do amateurs also make a pilgrimage to these…
I am a queer author of over thirty novels, most recently The House in the Cerulean Sea, Under the Whispering Door, In the Lives of Puppets, and my upcoming novel, Wolfsong. Though I’ve written across many genres, science fiction, and fantasy are where I feel most at home, and my writing reflects that. I love exploring worlds where good people fight for what’s right even when they make mistakes along the way. Humanity is always at the forefront of what I do, and though we can be disappointing, there is nothing quite like us in all the universe—as far as we know.
Imagine, if you will: the world’s tallest mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean. Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And what happens when dumb, curious humans (a natural but very dangerous combination) decide to go investigate?
They certainly don’t have fun! But the reader will because this horror novel is so wonderfully weird that I was gobsmacked by the time I finished. You can’t be sad when you’re wondering if there are monsters in the snow…
A mind-bending speculative thriller in which the sudden appearance of a mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean leads a group of scientists to a series of jaw-dropping revelations that challenge the notion of what it means to be human.
IF YOU EVER READ THIS TELL OTHERS DON'T COME HERE.
When a mountain mysteriously appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a group of scientists are sent to investigate - and discover what is at the summit.
Eminent scientist, explorer and chronic loner Harry Tunmore is among those asked to join the secret mission - and he has…
I’m the USA Today bestselling author of nineteen romances including the He Wanted Me Pregnant! series of short, steamy, standalone reads, several of which feature curvy heroines. I believe there’s room in romance for heroes and heroines of all shapes and sizes and I love to see curvy girls find their one-and-only: someone who loves them exactly the way they are. I like my curvy heroines to be smart, witty, and have depth and I like my romances to be just the right mix of squee-inducing instalove and steamy scenes.
Maybe it’s because I live in a city but I’m a sucker for outdoor settings both in my own books and in those I read. This book by Mia Brody pushes all the right buttons: we’ve got Crew, a prickly but good-hearted muscled lumberjack, and Maggie, a curvy bride who’s running away from a polite-language-can’t-describe-how-horrible-he-is groom. Fortunately, as she hightails it away from the arranged marriage from hell, she spins off the road and winds up stuck in a cabin with Crew in the middle of a snowstorm. It’s sweet, it’s steamy, it moves fast and it’s just the perfect read to snuggle up with when the wind’s howling outside.
Lemony
Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events has been my go-to for reading this
year.
I thoroughly enjoy his humorous tone, but I also feel the frustration of
tragedy the main characters, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, endure. My
favorite in the series so far is The Slippery Slope. I didn’t want to put the
book down as the riveting plot takes you to the Mortmain Mountains, where Violet
and Klaus must rescue their sister.
I have younger siblings, two brothers and a
sister, who I’ve had many adventures with as we’ve grown up into our teenage
years.
There is nothing to be found in Lemony Snicket's 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' but misery and despair. You still have time to choose another international best-selling series to read. But if you insist on discovering the unpleasant adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, then proceed with caution...
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky.
In The Slippery Slope the siblings face a secret message, a toboggan, a deceitful trap, a swarm of snow gnats and a scheming villain...
I embarked as a teenager on an overland journey from Europe to Nepal, and have made a career out of returning to the Himalaya as often as possible. My research and photographic expeditions to the mountains over the many decades have led me into some of the most exquisite landscapes and cultures on the planet. In all cases, I seek to combine the physical experiences with aesthetic and spiritual ones, and the books I tend to read about the region also move me in those directions.
I’ve read a slew of books about climbing the big Himalayan summits and this is one of the best. It chronicles the first ascent of Mount Everest by an American team and in doing so provides a thrilling account of the climb itself, of the natural majesty of the mountain, and of the eccentric personalities of the team’s members.
In the midst of the Cold War, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the space race with the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War, a band of iconoclastic American mountaineers set off for Mount Everest, aiming to restore America's confidence and optimism. Their objective was to reach the summit while conducting scientific research, but which route would they take? Might the Chinese have reached the top ahead of them? And what about another American team, led by the grandson of a President, that nearly bagged the peak in a bootleg attempt a year earlier?
Iwas an under-employed Scottish poet hillwalker when I met a Himalayan mountaineer in a pub. Due to alcohol and a misunderstanding about the metaphorical nature of Poetry, Mal Duff asked me to join an attempt to climb the legendary 24,000ft Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram. By the time I admitted I had no climbing experience whatsoever and was scared of heights, it was too late. Those Scottish winters’ apprenticeships and following Himalayan expeditions re-shaped my writing life, outlook, and friendships. My books have been shortlisted three times for the Boardman-Tasker Award for outstanding mountaineering literature, for Summit Fever; Kingdoms of Experience (Everest the Unclimbed Ridge); Electric Brae.
Probably the funniest and most inventive climbing expedition book ever written, loved by climbers who appreciate its satire, spoof, mickey-taking pastiche of Serious Mountaineering Expedition Books. It is Chris Bonnington turned Wodehouse, Jon Krakauer rendered by Spike Milligan. Its knowing self-mockery of all the tropes and self-important delusions of Climbing is sharp and accurate enough to raise it high above whimsy. Wildly creative, it is impossible to read without snorting in one’s sleeping bag. It is the comic, ridiculous side of the great pursuit of Getting Higher.
An English comic novel about a World War II expedition to a Himalayan peak.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BILL BRYSON
An outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, The Ascent of Rum Doodle has been a cult favourite since its publication in 1956. Led by the reliably under-insightful Binder, a team of seven British men -- including Dr Prone (constantly ill), Jungle the route finder (constantly lost), Constant the diplomat (constantly arguing) -- and 3,000 Yogistani porters sets out to conquer the highest peak in the Himalayas.
As a boy in southern California, I knew that the mountains were to the north, that they were big, and that they were somehow related to earthquakes. I loved chemistry and the outdoors and decided on the first day of college that geology offered a great way to be an outdoor chemist. I learned the craft of writing in high school as a sports reporter for the local paper. After I started as a geology professor at the University of North Carolina in 1981, Bob Sharp of Caltech and I founded the Geology Underfoot series to get people into the outdoors to discover geology on their own.
Jones gives a modern account of the roles that the Sierra Nevada range has played in the history of California: barrier to transportation, source of gold, source of water, desert maker, provider of unique ecosystems, inspiration of water law and mining law, target of vacationers, hikers, and climbers, and inspirer of the national park system. This engaging book weaves the history of exploration and development of the state into the larger story of why the range exists, what it is made of, and why it is so odd that the Sierra Nevada, unlike most tall mountain ranges, lacks a low-density root to hold it up. Jones excels at explaining things that I never even thought to wonder about.
From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn't) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country.
The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad…
I’ve been writing about cycling for 30 years and over that time I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the exploits of bike racers in the mountains and, above all, by this magnificent terrain itself. This ultimately led to my family leaving our home in the north of England and moving to the French Pyrenees, to a tiny hamlet that’s close to nowhere but is surrounded by mountains, where we can walk and ride endlessly through stunning countryside. I may not be French, but this is where I feel most at home.
I’ve been drawn to the mountains since I was a child and reading this book helped hugely in explaining my fascination with this terrain.
It details how man was initially fearful of the mountains and how that situation changed from the 17th century on, and looks at early attempts to explore and understand these highlands, with a particular focus on mountaineering. It’s beautifully written and very engaging.
Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride.
In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.
When I worked as a middle school teacher, I surveyed more than 200 students how they felt about books that included sadness and grief. The overwhelming answer from the students was that while adults too often minimize their feelings and dismiss the validity of their heartache, books do not. Many young readers want books that are honest and raw enough not to shield them from the world, but to pay enough attention to its pain to light a path, knowing that they can keep moving forward in the dark when they feel less alone and less afraid.
While adults are sometimes accused of forgetting what it feels like to be young, that cannot be said of Edith Hemingway, who so vividly captures the grief of 11-year-old Annie in Road to Tater Hill.
While Annie’s dad is across the ocean serving in the Air Force, Annie’s day-old baby sister dies, leaving her mother distant and depressed. Annie, who spends the summer at her grandparents’ mountain home, finds an unexpected friendship to be part of her journey to healing.
It’s a powerful book with vivid scenes that have stayed with me years after reading it.
Annie can always count on spending summers at her grandparents'. This summer should be even better because Mama is going to have a baby soon. Before Daddy leaves for his Air Force assignment, he gives Annie a journal for summer memories. But now Annie is grieving over the death of her newborn sister. How can she tell Daddy that ever since the baby died, Mama has been slipping away? If Annie wrote those words, Mama might stay that way forever. The only comfort Annie finds is in holding a stone she calls her "rock baby." Then Annie secretly befriends a…
Iwas an under-employed Scottish poet hillwalker when I met a Himalayan mountaineer in a pub. Due to alcohol and a misunderstanding about the metaphorical nature of Poetry, Mal Duff asked me to join an attempt to climb the legendary 24,000ft Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram. By the time I admitted I had no climbing experience whatsoever and was scared of heights, it was too late. Those Scottish winters’ apprenticeships and following Himalayan expeditions re-shaped my writing life, outlook, and friendships. My books have been shortlisted three times for the Boardman-Tasker Award for outstanding mountaineering literature, for Summit Fever; Kingdoms of Experience (Everest the Unclimbed Ridge); Electric Brae.
I first read this among my father’s books as a child. I believe he had met Smythe in London in the early 30, thus his signed copy of The Valley of Flowers. This is the quintessential book of that era of passionate amateur climbing and exploration, the age of Shipton and Tilman, of highly knowledgeable and deeply eccentric personalities. The writing is lyrical, just this side of purple, earthed by Smythe’s passion for botany, photography, and close observation. In the true sense of amateur, Kanchenjunga is a great adventure expedition in a time that will not come again. This is the book that prompted me to accept an invitation to climb with an expedition on a serious Himalayan mountain with real mountaineers, despite my lack of experience and hardwired dislike of heights. It changed my life. I like to think Smythe would have approved.
'We went to Kangchenjunga in response not to the dictates of science, but in obedience to that indefinable urge men call adventure.'
In 1930, an expedition set out to climb the world's third-highest mountain, Kangchenjunga. As yet unclimbed, a number of attempts had been made on the peak, including two in the previous year. The Kangchenjunga Adventure records Frank Smythe's attempts as part of an international team to reach the summit, how a deadly avalanche, which killed one of the sherpas, brought an end to their climb and how they turned their attentions instead to Jonsong Peak, which offered a…
