Reddit reviews Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival

I know literally nothing about Everest, and have never gone anywhere you can't plug in a hairdryer, but I've read a few books about climbing, and I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near that simple. Mountains aren't perfect triangles. You have to climb up and down and up and down, and sometimes you start climbing down and realize you're facing a crevasse and you have to go back up, or you have to spend days scrambling across a field of rocks.

In this case, the girlfriend fell early on and may have been too injured to walk, and within a pretty short timeframe they both would have been too weak to make it down alive. It probably made more sense to find shelter and wait for rescue.

Edit: Into Thin Air, Dead lucky, and Touching the Void are all really good reads, if you're interested. Lincoln Hall's story was made into a documentary, and the 2015 Everest movie is pretty good.

An Island to Oneself is a great read. Also, Touching the Void is a pretty intense true tale.

Hmmm... fiction? Non-fiction? First-person meaning told through a first-person narrative style, or just generally following a single person fighting for survival?

Fiction-wise, I'm a fan of To The White Sea by James Dickey. I've also always heard universally good things about the young adult novel Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, but have yet to read it myself.

In the realm of non-fiction, Touching The Void is a pretty incredible story, and was made into a stellar documentary film. Also, anything about the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica is worth checking out, so there you've got Endurance by Alfred Lansing, as well as Shackleton's own account, South: The Endurance Expedition.

Yeah, training is probably about a third of it, you gotta have funding.

My tip to the OP, read Krakauer's book:

http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/0385494785

and another viewpoint:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Climb-Tragic-Ambitions-Everest/dp/0312206372/ref=pd_sim_b_3

not Everest, but an idea of how bad things can go:

http://www.amazon.com/Touching-Void-Story-Miraculous-Survival/dp/0060730552/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Touching the Void. It is a great book about a mountaineering accident and the will to survive.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060730552/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_IuWAyb23PV3E4

Touching the Void

Really good book.

In the crazy survival department, Touching the Void is a personal favorite, and for anyone who appreciates satirical humor, The Ascent of Rum Doodle might be among the the top of the genre as a whole, not just as a climbing book. Definitely give it a read if you haven't already.