This week's blind read started with a black and white photo: a man grinning around a fat cigar, ice crusted thick in his beard, missing front tooth and all. That's Henry Worsley, and by the time this photo was taken he was deep into a solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica ... over a thousand miles of ice, no dog team, no support crew, nobody coming to check on him if something went wrong.

We went in knowing nothing except the title and the author (per usual for us) and came out somewhere we didn't expect: deep in the story of Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer Worsley had idolized since he was a kid marking bird nests on his boarding school grounds. Turns out you can't understand what pushed one man onto the most dangerous ice on Earth without understanding who he was trying to become.

"That's Genevieve. And that' ...