Review of 'The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to a Long and Happy Life' on 'GoodReads'
2 stars
Shallow, incurious applications of 'wisdom' from the shire. The wisdom consists of trite observations that ignore class, culture, and the fact that hobbits are fictional characters made up by one person. I love tolkien and nostalgia as much as the next white nerd, but this book doesn't present anything like why we could or should care about tolkien and his works of fiction beyond that presumed personal love of it.
If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for …
Review of 'Into the Silence' on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
This book is not for the faint of detail-- I've a great interest in various hubristic mountaineering exploits, and this book has still taken me several attempts to get through (much like a summit push muahahaha). How I ended up reading and perceiving this book is by imagining that the most enthusiastic, well-researched person with adhd/autism was telling me everything about the first English attempts on Everest. The pros of this approach are that you learn things you didn't know you were going to learn-- what daily life was like in a Tibetan monastery in the shadows of Everest, or how the English first made contact with the Tibetans (spoilers, it went so badly), and EVERY DETAIL about the fighting during wwI at Ypres. The con of this approach is just that-- you hear about Ypres and the Somme several times in this book, and in excruciating, visceral detail. As …
This book is not for the faint of detail-- I've a great interest in various hubristic mountaineering exploits, and this book has still taken me several attempts to get through (much like a summit push muahahaha). How I ended up reading and perceiving this book is by imagining that the most enthusiastic, well-researched person with adhd/autism was telling me everything about the first English attempts on Everest. The pros of this approach are that you learn things you didn't know you were going to learn-- what daily life was like in a Tibetan monastery in the shadows of Everest, or how the English first made contact with the Tibetans (spoilers, it went so badly), and EVERY DETAIL about the fighting during wwI at Ypres. The con of this approach is just that-- you hear about Ypres and the Somme several times in this book, and in excruciating, visceral detail. As I listened to the audiobook, I was able to tune in and out of this detail pleasantly enough, and as my interest is not only in Mallory and the mountain but also the time period and the events occuring at that time, I didn't mind it. But hot damn is this a polarizing approach, and one I had to take in bursts (again much like an Everest expedition haha). On the whole, the books I read again and again about Mallory are much shorter and more listenable, but this is a great one for learning the entire gestalt of the approach on Everest.
