The Gifts of Reading.

 Preview 

p. 31-32: As I work on this essay, over the Christmas of 2015, I know that a copy of my book The Wild Places is being sledge-hauled to the South Pole by a young Scottish adventurer called Luke Robertson, who is aiming to become the youngest Briton to ski there unassisted, unsupported and solo. Robertson’s sledge weighs seventeen stone, and he is dragging it for thirty-five days over 730 miles of snow and ice, in temperatures as low as -50˚C, and winds as high as 100mph. Under such circumstances I felt impossibly proud that The Wild Places (paperback weight: 8.9oz) had earned its place on his sledge, and impossibly excited at the thought of my sentences being read out there on the crystal continent, under the endless daylight of the austral summer.