Sometimes there is a perfect synergy of my interests and I feel like I'm hitting some kind of literary touchdown. Most recently I got lucky with The Summit of the Gods Vol 1 by Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi. It's a graphic novel and I took a chance on it because it's about mountaineering and the art is by Taniguchi whose work I adore. (I'd love to know how this book is already only for sale used since it just came out in July. My comics shop got it for me.) Anyway, the first book (there are five in the series) is about a Japanese photographer who accompanied an expedition up Everest that ended in tragedy. Rather than return home with the rest of the members, he lingers in Kathmandu and stumbles upon an antique camera in a local shop. He suspects it belonged to the most famous mountaineer of all time - George Mallory. While confirming these suspicions he finds several mysteries however, including the disappearance and reappearance of a famous (and fictional) Japanese mountaineer.

The narrator, Makoto Fukamachi, can't let Mallory or Jouji Habu go - he has to keep asking questions; he has to keep looking for answers. You would think that there wouldn't be enough to this story - why did Hobu stop climbing, is the camera really Mallory's - and yet if anything, there is more than you can imagine. There is the whole question of climbing and even more so, what it means to be brave or conversely, what it means to be foolish. It's simply wonderful and I couldn't put it down. The fact that it fits so perfectly into my current research was just icing on the cake. Can't wait for Volume 2 due sometime this month.

I'm still asking questions about the choices we make, and the myths we try to make real. Wallace Stegner is helping a lot with that, and so is Thoreau and Mallory and oddly, so is Jack Kerouac. And even though it pains me to admit it, so is Chris McCandless. Oddly all of this helps as I now put my two Alaska books together, hopefully into a more complete package that an editor will find compelling. The journey to the finish line for Map of My Dead Pilots is one I don't think anyone could possibly have imagined. (I know I didn't.) The new research has made me understand the old book more - and what I want it to be more. And convinced me that the two books have to be one. (That's how I'm spending my winter vacation btw.) So I just keep reading and keep writing and keep hoping for some understanding of who these famous people were and they help me find who we all once were.

A graphic novel on mountain climbers makes me see pilots in Alaska. It's all good - and Summit of the Gods is, in fact, quite wonderful.