I’m not sure why it is, but I love reading stories of disaster or near-disaster. I’ve already confessed my morbid fascination with stories of epidemic disease, but I also love stories of high adventure that occur at a level slightly above the microbial.
One of my favorites is Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (1959), about a shipwreck in the Antarctic. I hesitate to say much else about it because in spite of being a famous historical episode, the narrative unwinds very suspensefully.
Another chilling favorite is Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival (1988), which tells an almost unbelievable story of a mountaineering disaster in the Andes.
In a similar vein, I was very pregnant and sluggish when Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (1997) let me go on that adventure vicariously from my armchair.
And, stepping back a few centuries, at the moment, I am absolutely addicted to In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (2000), a well-told historical account of the real-life whaling disaster that inspired Moby-Dick, which, I am sorry to say, I have never finished. But Nathaniel Philbrick has almost convinced me to give it another, well, harpoon. A visit to the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum–and then a washed-up whale on the beach near my grandma’s beach cabin in Amaganssett when I was all of 5 or 6 gave me a lifelong fascination with whaling; a fascination that is fun to explore with grown-up eyes.
If you love stories of disasters, why? What makes tales of disaster so popular? What are some of your favorites?
(all images via Wikipedia and published under CC license)