Q2 Outside Reading Post 1

For my second quarter outside reading I am reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Its the story of the author's disastrous experience climbing Mount Everest. I choose to read it because last quarter I read Into the Wild which is also by Krakauer and I really liked it. Its the story of Chris McCandless, the young man who gave up a comfortable future to live off the land in Alaska. I read the first two chapters of Into Thin Air, and they tell the reader right away what happens on the trip: Five of the climbers in Krakauer's group die, and others get severely frostbitten and get amputated. In the beginning of Into the Wild, Krakauer also tells what happens in the end of the book: the main character dies. I think this is Krakauer's style of writing, and it comes from his journalistic back round. His books are not so much a story as a analysis of a story. Another similarity betwixt the two books is that they both have side stories to support the main story. In Into Thin Air he writes about the discovery of Everest being the tallest mountain in the world, the first expeditions to summit it, and his past climbing stories. In Into the Wild Krakauer writes about various other idealistic young men and their stories, including a rope-less rock climber from the twenties and a crazy hippie who tried living like a neanderthal with no modern tools or technology. From my observations thus far, I believe I will be finding more similarities between the two novels.