Welcome to Litsy!

A mere 19 years ago, I picked this book up as a souvenir while visiting a bar named after the book in Kathmandu, Nepal. Now I‘ve finally finished it! It‘s lighthearted and silly, like if Monty Python did a movie about mountaineering. For me, I‘m relieved to have finally crossed this off my list after nearly two decades, but I can only give it maybe 3.5/5 since it‘s such a light jaunt.

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SEND DOWN ANOTHER BOTTLE. Champagne as a prescription drug by Ailing.

Look how pretty! It is among the funniest books I read!

Nothing could be further from my interests than mountaineering and slapstick British parody/comedy. It speaks volumes about this classic that I genuinely adored this gem - and loved the unlikely funny yet somehow genuine characters. I was attracted to it thanks to the gorgeous new hardbound version I found at Hatchards (don‘t judge me for judging a book by its cover!)

I have to give this a pick because intellectually I know it‘s a funny book and at the height of its genre but it‘s not for me. The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a parody of the great mountaineering memoirs. Its intellectual and hysterical in places but it also strays, intentionally, into that sort of highly British, slapstick parody humour that I loathe. Climbers of all stripes and lovers of both Blackadder and Mr. Bean, would probably adore this book.

Clearly hoping to be a sharp satire of colonialist explorationism, this absurdist tale of ignorance, racism and arrogance loses what wit its orginial might have contained in its german translation. Even usually reliable narrator Jürgen von der Lippe fails to grasp his protagonists' subtle irony, an upper class gentleman of undeterrable naïvité and optimism. Reimagined as a Monty Python sketch, this piece of nonesense fiction might have been better