The Book of Lamps and Banners by Elizabeth Hand. The fourth and most recent Cass Neary book, in which Cass meets up with old flame Quinn again and sets off on a wild goose chase in Sweden to steal a treasure / save a techbro (gender neutral) woman who suffers from similar trauma to Cass / save the world from the worst possible techbro idea of trauma therapy. Which of these is serving as Cass's motivation at any given time is very much up in the air.

This book takes Cass on an actual arc of sorts and leaves her someplace new, while still leaving her open to further adventures. I appreciate that Hand understands one of the essential elements of these books is Cass suffering through miserable, cold, wet weather. I also appreciate that despite a surfeit of Quinn in the middle, the finale of the book is all about Cass and Tindra the techbro. And despite Cass giving away(!!!) her camera in the last book, she does come into a new one here, also very important. There is less photography in this book than previous, and it is less central to the story, but we still get some here and there.

Overall, very much a Cass Neary story, and I like those, so.

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Journalist joins a guided group climbing Everest, is conveniently on hand to document the worst loss of life on the mountain up to that point.

I've been hearing about this book for years and years and was pretty sure I would love it; I just hadn't gotten around to it. Well, I finally got around to it, and indeed I loved it. I DMed someone within the first twenty pages and said, "I can already tell this is going to be deliciously horrible," and it was! Krakauer is a great writer, immensely readable, great at building tension.

Honestly, the actual deaths in this book are unsurprising. Mostly they're due to exposure, which seems a likely way to die on a mountain higher than the cruising altitude of jet airplanes. What I found really gripping was how miserable everything else was, especially the effects of being at such high altitudes. Not just the addled thinking from getting so little oxygen, although that's a nightmare in itself, but the fact that above a certain altitude, people basically stop eating because they can't get enough oxygen to digest the food, so it just makes them feel sick. And this while they are expending enormous amounts of calories! Climbing Everest just sounds like an absolute slog, which Krakauer hammers home continually. Weirdly enough, the closest reading experience I can think of is The Long Walk by Stephen King, which is also about putting your body through absolute hell and possible (/probable) death for no good reason.

There's an incredible horror-style stinger about 4/5 of the way through the book that I did not see coming at all, and it really brought home the nightmarish feeling of the whole thing. A++.

Combine that with the fact that there's no good way to get a body off Everest, and it's much too cold and low-oxygen for anything to decay, and you end up with situations like a sherpa who goes up the mountain every year and passes by the preserved frozen body of his friend who died on the side of the trail. (Death in the clouds: the problem with Everest's 200+ bodies.) Grim!

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K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs. A world-famous climber and the first American to summit all fourteen mountains taller than 8k meters tells the stories of some of the most memorable expeditions to K2, as well as his own experience climbing it.

Yeah so after Into Thin Air, I've been on a whole mountaineering journey, lol. Generally I enjoyed this a lot. It lacks the propulsive narrative flow of the Krakauer book, not least because there's a half-dozen expeditions here, so less time to really sink into a single experience, but I enjoyed Viesturs's balance of meticulous sourcing of historical documents and his own perspective as an experienced climber. If you want an introduction to the history of climbing K2, you could do much worse. He's done another one on expeditions to Annapurna that I will get to at some point.

Incredible factoid from this book: the first attempted climb of K2 included ALEISTER CROWLEY. What the fuck. I feel like at some point I need to learn more about him, because he's adjacent to a number of my interests. Including this one, somehow!

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Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2 by Jennifer Jordan.

After the two extremely dude-focused books above I thought I would like to read about some women. This seems to be one of the major works on high-altitude women climbers, but unfortunately I didn't get on with it at all. Jordan has an enormous bibliography in the back but doesn't cite sources for literally anything, which makes the whole thing feel untrustworthy (I am not in general a fan of narrative nonfiction) and also means it's mostly summary. Which is boring! Please lady, put in some direct quotes once in a while! Even in translation, since many of your subjects are Polish! The fact that Jordan does not seem to be a climber herself, or at least is unwilling to include that expertise in the narrative, also makes the book less engaging than the previous ones.

I DNFed this one. I'm now into Arlene Blum's book on how she led the first women's expedition to Annapurna. It's slow going because the library only has it on audiobook, but I'm enjoying it so far. Lots of interesting stuff on leadership within the group, group dynamics, lack of institution support for the trip, the logistics of managing the porters to get all their stuff to the mountain.