1. No Shortcuts to the Top - Ed Viesturs with David Roberts

Mountaineering is one of those things that I would never, ever be able to do. Regardless, I love to learn more about it. While Everest is the tallest mountain, hundreds of people had stood at it's top. Far fewer have done it without the assistance of supplemental oxygen. The holy grail of mountaineering is a special, almost insane challenge: to climb all 14 8,000-meter peaks. One list I found counts 14 people worldwide who have climbed, reached the summit, and returned safely to the base camps. For this type of challenge, the use of oxygen or not is irrelevant. It's dangerous, borderline insane, has a small window of opportunity each year, and requires multiple years and possibly multiple trips to the same mountain to complete. One American has completed this task, without the assistance of bottled oxygen: Ed Viesturs. No Shortcuts to the Top is his story of this quest.

The book opens with a nightmare scenario involving Ed and his friend, Scott Fischer, on K2 in 1992. The pair take a tumble while climbing and have to use a technique called "self-arrest" in order to stop their descent into a deep crevasse. From there, the book chronicles how Ed, a Illinois kid of immigrant parents, developed a love of mountains and climbing; interspersing this with tales of mountaineering adventures. He eventually gives up a veterinary practice to become a full time mountaineer. The book also covers the 1996 Everest disaster, while is excellently written about in Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. Annapurna, one of the world's most dangerous mountains, becomes something of a secondary character in the book.

No Shortcuts to the Top is not the typical mountaineering book. It's not steeped in technical terminology about mountaineering. It is well written, engaging, and the inevitable losses of life that occur in high-altitude environments are always heart-stopping. Overall, it was a wonderful book. It was a very entertaining look into a world that most of us will never get nor want to experience.