Let's discuss "West with the Night" by Beryl Markham

"...to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable probability. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star — if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant."

West with the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, and later working as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there. Ernest Hemingway called it “a bloody wonderful book."

Markham was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a non-stop solo flight against the prevailing Atlantic winds. When she decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had completed the westward flight solo.
(From West with the Night - Wikipedia).

This is a departure from our regular classical literature selections for your easy summer reading pleasure. Her book, as the works by Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars), helps us appreciate the magic and the immense challenges of flying in the early days of aviation and personal sacrifices the pilots of that period were willing to make.