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| photo: Peter Hoang |
David Smart writes about climbing and is the author of Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss, winner of the prize for Climbing Literature from the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, and Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites, winner of the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. He also was honored with the H. Adams Carter Literary Award from the American Alpine Club. Royal Robbins: The American Climber, just out from Mountaineers Books, is the biography of one of America's most influential climbers.
Handsell readers your book in approximately 25 words or less:
Royal Robbins was one of the greatest pioneers in American outdoors culture. He introduced big-wall climbing and clean climbing, and introduced the world to Yosemite climbing. His rags-to-riches story is deeply inspiring.
On your nightstand now:
The latest translation of Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed and Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, a family saga set in modern China. My wife and I take turns reading different books to each other. I write first thing when I get up in the morning and read last thing at night.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I read P.C. Wren's Beau Geste so many times that I could once quote it at length. I liked history and adventure. I had such faith in a book's power to fill me with the emotions I would have if I were part of the events they described that I still recall reading it with a sense of nostalgia for the fulfillment it gave me. I learned to read a book with the belief that no matter whether it was supposed to be a work of great importance or a popular novel, there was beauty and significance of some kind in it. I recently discovered that Wren may have fabricated his Foreign Legion experience, which makes me want to read his book again to see if there are any clues.
Your top five authors:
Proust for style and vision. Ernest Hemingway, partly for style and partly for storytelling. David Roberts, who wrote the first deeply psychological and emotionally relatable (for me) book about climbing. Italian mountaineering authors from the 1930s, like Dino Buzzati and Guido Rey for the way they write about climbing as an ethereal relationship between climbing and philosophy that seems both timeless and deeply entrenched in their time.
Book you've faked reading:
I might have given the impression that I read all of James Joyce's Ulysses, but I've only read excerpts. I read so many climbing books that there are also books I think I've read and later realized I haven't. I always assumed I had read Royal Robbins's Advanced Rockcraft because I own a copy, but realized as soon as I cracked the covers a couple of years ago that it was full of insights I had never read--or perhaps forgotten.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Scottish author A.L. Kennedy's On Bullfighting is one of the most searing and penetrating examinations of the culture and practice of dangerous sports. I'll never forget it. Perhaps the surfing memoir that won the Pulitzer, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, is the closest climbing-adjacent book I have read. I loved it, too.
Book you've bought for the cover:
George Meyers's Yosemite Climber with its incredible cover photo of Peter Mayfield on Half Dome, and perhaps I bought it even more for the photo of Dave Diegelman hanging from the giant overhang of the Separate Reality climb in Yosemite. French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat's Starlight and Storm: the breathtaking photographs of the Mont Blanc range by French climbing photographer by Pierre Tairraz totally overshadowed the text.
Book you hid from your parents:
I actually had to hide not just books but also my reading habits. I spent so much time reading that my mother would tell me to stop or I would hurt my eyes. I also had a teacher who wrote on my report card that I read too many books. It's hard to choose just one, as I tended to be an adventurous reader. I had copies of Mario Puzo's The Godfather; Henri Charrière's Devil's Island prison biography, Papillon (both of these books were banned from my middle school); and later, when I was a teenager, volumes of French poetry that would have scandalized my parents, had they been inclined to read them, which they were not.
Book that changed your life:
Books are always changing my life! A long time ago, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Recently, We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen, an intergenerational tale of a Danish fishing town. I sometimes think about writing a novel like it but focusing on a mountain town.
Favorite line from a book:
"Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins." This is by Chekhov. It's the essence of biographical writing.
Five books you'll never part with:
In Search of Lost Time by Proust; Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; The Mountain of My Fear/Deborah: Two Mountaineering Classics by David Roberts; A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Generally, my favorite books improve with rereading, but I remember the thrill of reading A Farewell to Arms for the first time."In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels." It evokes the mood of the mountains of northern Italy, where I have spent a lot of time.
The Federal Trade Commission will file an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon later this month, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited "people familiar with the matter." The FTC "has been examining Amazon practices, including whether it favors its own products over competitors' on its platforms and how it treats outside sellers on Amazon.com."
Marissa Mills is the new owner of 
Last weekend, the team behind Molly's Tuxedo (Little Bee Books) visited the 
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Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun
Julie Kim's enchanting Where's Halmoni? (2017) introduced older sister Jin (also called Noona, or big sister in Korean), younger brother Joon, and their Halmoni (grandmother), whose home contains a magic portal into a mythical world of Korean folktales come to life. The trio returns in Where's Joon?, to experience another visually spectacular adventure, enhanced by Kim's bilingual exposition.