Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer (sort of)
Flash Fiction Forward is an anthology of, as the subtitle may suggest, 80 very short stories. Very short is right; none were over 500 words. I enjoyed a great many of these short-shorts, though in general I find this genre a bit of a paradox. I love writing short-shorts. I also love reading them. Some of them carry weight that far exceeds their paltry word count. But by and large, they’re…not long enough. I want to tell the author of short-shorts to go on. What next? Such is the nature of this genre, though, so it’s not a complaint. Like I said, I love reading them, I love writing them, and I hope to assemble a collection of my own short-shorts one of these days because I love how the short-short toes the line of prose poetry.
The only other book I picked up in all of March was Into Thin Air, a book that I’d heard a lot about during my MFA schoolery, but one with which I was totally unfamiliar. Sometime last spring or summer, I went to a YMCA book fair with my Baba-in-law (my husband’s grandmother). The books I came away with were her treat. I’m so glad that she only spent around 50 cents on this one. I started one night in mid-March, and dozed off after a page and a half. It languished on my nightstand for the next week or so; I’d pick it up night after night, read a couple pages, get bored, and fall asleep. At the end of March, my husband went out of town and I elected to spend the weekend at my parents’ house. Into Thin Air came along in my messenger bag. In a misguided attempt to force myself to finish it, I packed only Into Thin Air and the book of short-shorts I had to read for class. Finally, after two weeks of trying, I put Into Thin Air down after page 50. I purposely left it at my parents’ house so that I wouldn’t feel guilted into trying again. I guess Baba paid about a penny per page.
I didn’t care for Krakauer’s dry, journalistic style of writing, but I can’t blame my distaste for the book entirely on that. The truth is, I have subzero interest in mountain climbing. This book, as I failed to mention, chronicles an expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest in the mid-1990s wherein something like half of the people died. Yes, it’s incredible that people can accomplish something like scaling Mt. Everest. It’s pretty damn high up there. I couldn’t do it. And yes, it’s tragic that many have died in attempting it. But…here’s one way not to die while trying to scale Mt. Everest.
Don’t try to scale Mt. Everest.
I don’t mean to be callous or to diminish anyone’s accomplishments or dreams of climbing the highest mountain in the world. It’s just not my thing. It’s not even on my waiting list of things. I’ve never been interested in mountain climbing. It always seemed like a silly thing to do. You get all sweaty & scraped up & have a hard time breathing. Well, I can think of ways to do that while keeping myself more or less at sea level.
So I was definitely not a fan of Into Thin Air, but this book had the deck stacked against it from the get-go, and I can’t say that it’s the author’s fault. I’d still like to try reading Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Still involves death and mountains, but the death doesn’t result directly from climbing a mountain, so I’ll try to be open-minded.
