Inspiring books about mountaineering exploits

Recently, I’ve been reading a series of high altitude climbing-mountaineering books relating exploits and mishaps taking place in Asia, between the Karakorum and the Himalayas, and must say that not only this adventure reading keeps me on the edge of your seat, but is for me, also highly addictive. 

If I were not in my early 70s, I would get involved at once in that wonderful endeavor! No wonder then, that many climbing vocations have been ignited by the revelations contained in a regular dose of this kind of reading. 

I can vividly remember that, as an 8 to 10 year old child, I spent time in the summer in my Alpine pasture with a city-kid my age, from nearby Thonon, on Geneva Lake’s south shore, who had been totally raptured by reading the work from Roger Frison-Roche, that French prolific mountain writer who gain celebrity through “Premier de cordée” (First on the rope) in1944. 

That reading triggered his life-long passion for climbing and for trying to getting me bouldering on local cliffs. At home we had no such books, let alone nothing to read but the newspaper! Fortunately or unfortunately, I had no access to such books, and I obviously missed getting sucked into hard-core mountain climbing. 

If that had been the case, I might not be alive today to tell that story...