Musing Mondays

Musing Mondays is a weekly meme that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer:

            

- I'm currently reading…

- Up next I think I’ll read…

- I bought the following book(s) in the past week…

- I'm super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…

- I'm really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…

- I can’t wait to get a copy of…

- I wish I could read ___, but…

- I blogged about ____ this past week…

This week's random question: What is your most favorite book from your childhood?

PLEASE add your book comments at Books and a Beat, Thanks!

I'm currently reading… Back from a few weeks in The Adirondack Mountains (sigh, I want to go back and I will in three weeks).  While there I picked up a book from the shelves of the cabin that I had given over a decade ago to either my brother or father.  Looking forlorn it has found its way home for awhile and I'll bring it back when I go back for my mother's memorial and two more weeks of vacation. 

   

  Wild Stories: The Best of Men's Journal- 2003.  The stories are riveting about travel, close calls, facing grizzlies, fishing exploits and men's diverse adventures.  I'm loving it (except for the one about filming porn which I gladly skipped).  I find it totally unfair that "Men's Journal" has all the smart well written literature and how-to peices and women's magazines seem so light headed (unless you're a makeup queen).  And why do women's magazines have pictures of sexy women (hunh ?) and men's magazine sexy guys, not that I need to stare at sexy guys (my husband might object).  But I really don't get it.  I'm tempted to buy the Men's Journal, of course I could get my husband a subscription.  Once I did get him a copy and I loved the magazine- it was filled with how to make a compost heap and they had awesome adventure stories.  

One summer I read all the books I could grab of adventurous climbing in the Himalayas.  I would recommend that for an instant cold fix in a hot summer.  My favorite was "No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks" by Ed Viesturs about climbing 8,000 meter mountains.  Ed Viesturs is a climber who was supposed to be a part of the ill-fated climb up Everest that lost so many and he at the time was asked to film the "Everest" IMAX Documentary so he was at base camp instead.  

Looking through binoculars at the expedition high above filled with many of his friends and experts he remarked that he could see they were going beyond a point where all expert climbers agree if it's past a particular time you turn around.  Viesturs is a very cautious climber and you have got to wonder if the disaster would not of played out if he was still apart of it.  The classic recounting of that Everest disaster is in "Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster" – October 19, 1999 by Jon Krakauer. 

 A summer reading chilly books was loads of fun, it actually mentally made you shiver as you are with the climbers even if the temps were high!

Also check out "Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival" by Joe Simpson it is a true, riveting account of a man's survival from a climbing fall (his climbing partner leaving him for dead on the mountain after cutting him loose) and he literally crawled off a mountain in South America. Heroic.

     

     To answer the random question, What is your most favorite book from your childhood?, I'd say Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 1877.

The Tail end of the story-