Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Translated by Yuji Oniki
578 pages
Published 1999; English translation published 2003
Read from March 21 to March 29
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Lots of spoilers ahead; brief mention of sexual abuse.
I hate to reveal my lack of references again, but in all honesty Battle Royale reminded me of nothing but Michael Crichton. A Michael Crichton writing for teens and trying too hard to be hip, then translated with a tin ear into another language, but Michael Crichton all the same. Perhaps the thriller, as a genre, has constricted conventions of how a story should be told and how characters should be depicted. The shallow, cliche-based characters (the swishing, sneaking homosexual! the brilliant, unfeeling psychopath! the seemingly innocent schoolgirl turned evil by a lifetime of sexual abuse! not one but two brilliant and multitalented hackers! the attractive rock star everyman!) were all conventional thriller cannon fodder; the action sequences and unlikely physical feats were pure Crichton; the quick peek inside the head and history of a side character who immediately gets snuffed is a Crichton staple; even the island map in the frontispiece and the map-grid-as-plot-device seemed drawn from a forgotten Crichton work. I half expected dinosaurs to crash out of the forest and crunch up some students at various points -- which, by my standards, would have been a huge improvement. The insipid, overly descriptive prose I'm willing to blame on a combination of translation and differing storytelling expectations, but excusing its origin doesn't make it more engaging. On top of all that, I found the "twists" predictable, even banal.
Which isn't to say I totally hated it. I enjoyed Sakamochi's cheerful approach to "instructing" his "class," and I found myself almost moved a couple times in spite of myself. But I just can't forgive a book that ends with song lyrics, as if fading out into cinematic end credits over a freeze-frame of the two survivors running off into their next adventure.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
2014 read #30: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
128 pages
Published 1952
Read from March 20 to March 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Hemingway is usually held up to this day as the standard for new writers to emulate. Clipped prose, barely an adjective to be seen, clean and laconic and precise -- it's an easy mode to imitate before you find your own voice. I've gotten one or two compliments on the Hemingway-esque qualities of my writing (though not in these book reviews, obviously -- I don't give a damn how many adjectives or cliched phrases find their way into these, so long as I finish them in a reasonable amount of time). Which makes it funny that I haven't read any Hemingway before.
This was an engaging story that everyone who didn't grow up in a car was probably made to read at some point. I found the prose, and especially the dialogue, a bit too clipped for my taste, at least until I understood that the dialogue was not so much naturalistic as formalized. I don't have the points of reference to draw actual comparisons yet, but the back and forth between the boy and the old man had a rehearsed quality that seemed Classical, ritualized, as if spoken in a mystery play, and I grew to like it. Perhaps it was merely meant to sound Latin; I suspect the dialogue was written in Spanish, then translated. I was also interested in the subtle way Hemingway projects his ideas of masculinity, noting here and there that Santiago has no real choice but to prove himself and to kill, leaving aside so much as a single doubt of a man's purpose in life. Hemingway draws attention to it by being so deadpan about it, by not so much as questioning it.
As usual, the philosophical implications, the existentialism and whatnot, interested me less than my surface appreciation of the story.
128 pages
Published 1952
Read from March 20 to March 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Hemingway is usually held up to this day as the standard for new writers to emulate. Clipped prose, barely an adjective to be seen, clean and laconic and precise -- it's an easy mode to imitate before you find your own voice. I've gotten one or two compliments on the Hemingway-esque qualities of my writing (though not in these book reviews, obviously -- I don't give a damn how many adjectives or cliched phrases find their way into these, so long as I finish them in a reasonable amount of time). Which makes it funny that I haven't read any Hemingway before.
This was an engaging story that everyone who didn't grow up in a car was probably made to read at some point. I found the prose, and especially the dialogue, a bit too clipped for my taste, at least until I understood that the dialogue was not so much naturalistic as formalized. I don't have the points of reference to draw actual comparisons yet, but the back and forth between the boy and the old man had a rehearsed quality that seemed Classical, ritualized, as if spoken in a mystery play, and I grew to like it. Perhaps it was merely meant to sound Latin; I suspect the dialogue was written in Spanish, then translated. I was also interested in the subtle way Hemingway projects his ideas of masculinity, noting here and there that Santiago has no real choice but to prove himself and to kill, leaving aside so much as a single doubt of a man's purpose in life. Hemingway draws attention to it by being so deadpan about it, by not so much as questioning it.
As usual, the philosophical implications, the existentialism and whatnot, interested me less than my surface appreciation of the story.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
2014 read #29: Journey on the Crest by Cindy Ross.
Journey on the Crest: Walking 2600 Miles from Mexico to Canada by Cindy Ross
312 pages
Published 1987
Read from March 19 to March 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Finally! A straightforward book about long-distance backpacking that doesn't detour into political screeds, childrearing philosophies, intimate details of broken relationships, eating cremated remains, or any other bizarre and unappealing distraction! Ross's prose here is undeveloped, as if she stitched together actual journal entries with only minimal polish, but it's a brisk read and at times her descriptions are vivid. Not a perfect hiking narrative, but it's exactly what I asked for, so I'm happy with it.
Incidentally, the more narratives of the Pacific Crest Trail I read, the better I like my own hazy plan to hike it in sections, possibly skipping the clearcuts and the desert sections to string together the highlights. Racing from desert heat to deep Sierra snows and hauling ass to try to beat winter in the North Cascades seems like more work than enjoyment.
312 pages
Published 1987
Read from March 19 to March 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Finally! A straightforward book about long-distance backpacking that doesn't detour into political screeds, childrearing philosophies, intimate details of broken relationships, eating cremated remains, or any other bizarre and unappealing distraction! Ross's prose here is undeveloped, as if she stitched together actual journal entries with only minimal polish, but it's a brisk read and at times her descriptions are vivid. Not a perfect hiking narrative, but it's exactly what I asked for, so I'm happy with it.
Incidentally, the more narratives of the Pacific Crest Trail I read, the better I like my own hazy plan to hike it in sections, possibly skipping the clearcuts and the desert sections to string together the highlights. Racing from desert heat to deep Sierra snows and hauling ass to try to beat winter in the North Cascades seems like more work than enjoyment.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
2014 read #28: Pavane by Keith Roberts.
Pavane by Keith Roberts
278 pages
Published 1968
Read from March 16 to March 19
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The first two stories in this interconnected series of tales I read last year, included in the two Modern Classics volumes edited by Gardner Dozois. Those two samples beguiled me with Roberts' alternative England, a line of history where Elizabeth I had been assassinated, Rome imposed a strict theocracy across the known world, and technology was held back by papal mandate. Perhaps I should have overcome my reluctance to reread those opening chapters, because it took me a long time to get into Pavane without them. I liked it well enough, but the interlocked short story structure doesn't agree with me (for some reason lately I just haven't been feeling short fiction whatsoever). It wasn't until the final chapter, when (spoiler) people begin to rise against the theocratic despotism, that Pavane at last seemed as brilliant and masterful as all those modern-day genre critics and writers say it is.
Pavane seems a couple decades ahead of its time. Though all the chapters told from female points of view are suffused with male gaze (must every woman note how her breasts began to "press against her dress" during adolescent flashbacks?), the women characters are surprisingly vivid and interesting, given when this was written, driven by their own agency. Only the "Coda" dates Pavane, tacking on a formulaic "humanity was held back until it was wise enough to use technology, not like in that other timeline" stinger. That stinger is also the only justification for the inclusion of Fairy elements in what would otherwise be a "realistic" alternate history novel, an inclusion that was otherwise extraneous.
278 pages
Published 1968
Read from March 16 to March 19
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The first two stories in this interconnected series of tales I read last year, included in the two Modern Classics volumes edited by Gardner Dozois. Those two samples beguiled me with Roberts' alternative England, a line of history where Elizabeth I had been assassinated, Rome imposed a strict theocracy across the known world, and technology was held back by papal mandate. Perhaps I should have overcome my reluctance to reread those opening chapters, because it took me a long time to get into Pavane without them. I liked it well enough, but the interlocked short story structure doesn't agree with me (for some reason lately I just haven't been feeling short fiction whatsoever). It wasn't until the final chapter, when (spoiler) people begin to rise against the theocratic despotism, that Pavane at last seemed as brilliant and masterful as all those modern-day genre critics and writers say it is.
Pavane seems a couple decades ahead of its time. Though all the chapters told from female points of view are suffused with male gaze (must every woman note how her breasts began to "press against her dress" during adolescent flashbacks?), the women characters are surprisingly vivid and interesting, given when this was written, driven by their own agency. Only the "Coda" dates Pavane, tacking on a formulaic "humanity was held back until it was wise enough to use technology, not like in that other timeline" stinger. That stinger is also the only justification for the inclusion of Fairy elements in what would otherwise be a "realistic" alternate history novel, an inclusion that was otherwise extraneous.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
2014 read #27: The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper.
The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
278 pages
Published 1988
Read from February 26 to March 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead.
After a nuclear war devastates the globe, survivors gather under a leader named Martha Evesdaughter to build a new society, a better society, where indiscriminate war and the male lust for glory and domination and ownership will be bred out of the species, even if it takes a thousand years. Men are kept in garrisons, armed with Bronze Age technology, fed a cult of personal honor and duty and one-on-one combat, but given the chance to return to Women's Country should they choose. These less violent males become breeding stock, leading over many generations to brilliant, psychic empaths and clairvoyants, while the garrison males are told they are the sires of the "warriors' sons" birthed after every conjugal carnival, but they really aren't. And the breeding males and the ruling females can actually defend themselves, because they have like crazy ninja skills and weapons in addition to the clairvoyant empathy thing, so the warrior males are totally expendable. Got all that?
Allegorical novels can fall apart if the allegory doesn't grab the reader. Certainly the world didn't grab me, set up as it was solely to sustain the allegory. The characters could have been interesting if they hadn't all been making stupid, stubborn decisions because the plot needed them to. But the allegory here was the main thing, and it didn't work for me at all. For one thing, what was the allegorical meaning? That male-dominated societies suck, that men have all too often treated women as chattel and possessions, that honor and glory breed machismo and disrespect for women? All valid points, but even in 1988 I think you would have needed something more to bulk up your novel. Women's Country felt insubstantial -- and, worst of all, it was boring.
Tepper hints at the role of the Campbellian hero's quest as a male empowerment fantasy and a rationale for misogynistic behavior, a theme she would treat in great detail in Raising the Stones, but in neither book does she develop that thesis to any satisfactory conclusion. (Another thing she revisits in Sideshow is the caricature of the god-fearin' patriarchal society, which feels like a protracted detour in this book and led to a less than satisfying climax. Not elegant plotting.) The whole "breeding the violence out of the men" thing was some half-baked anthropology -- violence, cooperation, and empathy are largely modulated by culture, so I couldn't stop thinking how stupid it was to let the warrior males raise all the male children from age 5 on, Sparta style, if you wanted to set up a peaceful matriarchal society.
278 pages
Published 1988
Read from February 26 to March 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead.
After a nuclear war devastates the globe, survivors gather under a leader named Martha Evesdaughter to build a new society, a better society, where indiscriminate war and the male lust for glory and domination and ownership will be bred out of the species, even if it takes a thousand years. Men are kept in garrisons, armed with Bronze Age technology, fed a cult of personal honor and duty and one-on-one combat, but given the chance to return to Women's Country should they choose. These less violent males become breeding stock, leading over many generations to brilliant, psychic empaths and clairvoyants, while the garrison males are told they are the sires of the "warriors' sons" birthed after every conjugal carnival, but they really aren't. And the breeding males and the ruling females can actually defend themselves, because they have like crazy ninja skills and weapons in addition to the clairvoyant empathy thing, so the warrior males are totally expendable. Got all that?
Allegorical novels can fall apart if the allegory doesn't grab the reader. Certainly the world didn't grab me, set up as it was solely to sustain the allegory. The characters could have been interesting if they hadn't all been making stupid, stubborn decisions because the plot needed them to. But the allegory here was the main thing, and it didn't work for me at all. For one thing, what was the allegorical meaning? That male-dominated societies suck, that men have all too often treated women as chattel and possessions, that honor and glory breed machismo and disrespect for women? All valid points, but even in 1988 I think you would have needed something more to bulk up your novel. Women's Country felt insubstantial -- and, worst of all, it was boring.
Tepper hints at the role of the Campbellian hero's quest as a male empowerment fantasy and a rationale for misogynistic behavior, a theme she would treat in great detail in Raising the Stones, but in neither book does she develop that thesis to any satisfactory conclusion. (Another thing she revisits in Sideshow is the caricature of the god-fearin' patriarchal society, which feels like a protracted detour in this book and led to a less than satisfying climax. Not elegant plotting.) The whole "breeding the violence out of the men" thing was some half-baked anthropology -- violence, cooperation, and empathy are largely modulated by culture, so I couldn't stop thinking how stupid it was to let the warrior males raise all the male children from age 5 on, Sparta style, if you wanted to set up a peaceful matriarchal society.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
2014 read #26: Scraping Heaven by Cindy Ross.
Scraping Heaven: A Family's Journey Along the Continental Divide by Cindy Ross
325 pages
Published 2003
Read from March 7 to March 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I seem to rate these hiking narratives (or, in this case, llama-packing narrative) as a simple ratio between the amount of trail and scenery description and the amount of (to me) extraneous matter, like politics, religion, broad gender stereotyping, and weird interpersonal drama. I liked this book both for its glimpse of a new (to me) long distance trail and for its depiction of hiking long distances with young children, as Ross and her husband take their offspring along the Continental Divide Trail over the course of five summers. However, with each passing year Ross devotes less and less space to descriptions of what they see and do in the mountains; by their third or fourth season, Ross summarizes weeks of adventure into a single paragraph, leaving proportionally more and more of the narrative to reiterating the same basic points about how the journey is tough on their kids but teaches them self-confidence, how her husband is an uncommunicative male who gets grumpy because they can't have sex, how her kids marvelously adapt and entertain themselves, and oh, did she mention she feels this string of adventures teaches her kids their capabilities and how to believe in themselves? It gets a little preachy at times, diminishing what could otherwise be an interesting and unusual adventure tale. (Also repetitive: Ross makes sure to work in some variant of "scraping heaven" into her account of each and every summer on the trail.)
325 pages
Published 2003
Read from March 7 to March 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I seem to rate these hiking narratives (or, in this case, llama-packing narrative) as a simple ratio between the amount of trail and scenery description and the amount of (to me) extraneous matter, like politics, religion, broad gender stereotyping, and weird interpersonal drama. I liked this book both for its glimpse of a new (to me) long distance trail and for its depiction of hiking long distances with young children, as Ross and her husband take their offspring along the Continental Divide Trail over the course of five summers. However, with each passing year Ross devotes less and less space to descriptions of what they see and do in the mountains; by their third or fourth season, Ross summarizes weeks of adventure into a single paragraph, leaving proportionally more and more of the narrative to reiterating the same basic points about how the journey is tough on their kids but teaches them self-confidence, how her husband is an uncommunicative male who gets grumpy because they can't have sex, how her kids marvelously adapt and entertain themselves, and oh, did she mention she feels this string of adventures teaches her kids their capabilities and how to believe in themselves? It gets a little preachy at times, diminishing what could otherwise be an interesting and unusual adventure tale. (Also repetitive: Ross makes sure to work in some variant of "scraping heaven" into her account of each and every summer on the trail.)
Friday, March 7, 2014
2014 read #25: I Promise Not to Suffer by Gail D. Storey.
I Promise Not to Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail by Gail D. Storey
222 pages
Published 2013
Read from March 5 to March 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5
If this had been a novel instead of my current obsession, a hiking narrative, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. A needy and codependent woman follows her standard-issue stoic doctor husband on his thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. While he refuses to use maps, ask for directions, or talk about his feelings for months at a time, she obsesses over whether he really loves her or wants her to be there. All the while Storey weaves in recollections of the various New Age and neo-Buddhist retreats and encounters she had as a bored rich wife looking for some kind of prepackaged meaning, and traces it all back to her issues with her mother, who shut her out emotionally after Storey dared to sleep with some men back when she was in her 20s. On top of everything, the dialogue isn't naturalistic by any definition; the "characters" state what Storey needs them to, in order to forward the "plot."
If this hadn't been a hiking narrative, I would have found nothing of interest here. I don't like tales of the privileged and prosperous desperately seeking after "meaning," and Storey is egregious about this, rarely going more than a page or two without going on at length about how the PCT was magically "changing" the two of them, and oozing her affluence and wealth on every page. Enough of this crap about learning how to love the world in some cosmic pseudo-mystic malarkey. Just talk about trail experiences already.
222 pages
Published 2013
Read from March 5 to March 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5
If this had been a novel instead of my current obsession, a hiking narrative, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. A needy and codependent woman follows her standard-issue stoic doctor husband on his thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. While he refuses to use maps, ask for directions, or talk about his feelings for months at a time, she obsesses over whether he really loves her or wants her to be there. All the while Storey weaves in recollections of the various New Age and neo-Buddhist retreats and encounters she had as a bored rich wife looking for some kind of prepackaged meaning, and traces it all back to her issues with her mother, who shut her out emotionally after Storey dared to sleep with some men back when she was in her 20s. On top of everything, the dialogue isn't naturalistic by any definition; the "characters" state what Storey needs them to, in order to forward the "plot."
If this hadn't been a hiking narrative, I would have found nothing of interest here. I don't like tales of the privileged and prosperous desperately seeking after "meaning," and Storey is egregious about this, rarely going more than a page or two without going on at length about how the PCT was magically "changing" the two of them, and oozing her affluence and wealth on every page. Enough of this crap about learning how to love the world in some cosmic pseudo-mystic malarkey. Just talk about trail experiences already.
Monday, March 3, 2014
2014 read #24: The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman.
The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman
186 pages
Published 1979
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
This is the first of the Silver John novels, following after a series of short stories; "Walk Like a Mountain," an early favorite in Modern Classics of Fantasy, is the only Silver John story I've read to date, but Suffolk County's 56 public libraries lack any of the Silver John collections, so I'm beginning with this one. It's a comfortable, easygoing slip of a novel, more like a short story stretched to fit a novel's britches. I dig any book or story that treats with Old Weird Americana motifs, but this, sadly, was a bit of a lightweight. The plot is a confused mush of putative North American ape-men (per one of Louis Leakey's wilder late-career claims), Cherokee folklore, and Druids. There's a substantial element of Magical Native American here, but in context of everybody's old magic having real potency to it, I suppose maybe it isn't as patronizing as it could be.
186 pages
Published 1979
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
This is the first of the Silver John novels, following after a series of short stories; "Walk Like a Mountain," an early favorite in Modern Classics of Fantasy, is the only Silver John story I've read to date, but Suffolk County's 56 public libraries lack any of the Silver John collections, so I'm beginning with this one. It's a comfortable, easygoing slip of a novel, more like a short story stretched to fit a novel's britches. I dig any book or story that treats with Old Weird Americana motifs, but this, sadly, was a bit of a lightweight. The plot is a confused mush of putative North American ape-men (per one of Louis Leakey's wilder late-career claims), Cherokee folklore, and Druids. There's a substantial element of Magical Native American here, but in context of everybody's old magic having real potency to it, I suppose maybe it isn't as patronizing as it could be.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
2014 read #23: The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis.
The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis
Translated by W. H. D. Rouse
214 pages
Written ca. 380 BC; translation published 1947
Read from March 1 to March 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I intend to work my way through more of the ancient and medieval classics. One of these days I want to slap together something of a roughly chronological "course" for myself, beginning with rereads of The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad and so forth, making progress into Greek comedies and histories and tragedies and such that I haven't yet read, but for now I'll content myself with picking up whatever comes to mind. When Roger Hill (who played Cyrus in The Warriors) died the other day, I figured it was time to get a copy of Xenophon's Anabasis.
Writers didn't develop the technique of leaving out irrelevant detail until well after the days of Daniel Defoe. My eyes glazed over the various marching stages early in Anabasis, and the battle descriptions weren't always clear (or, at any rate, I didn't take the time to parse out each actor and movement, because I can be lazy like that). I did enjoy the various speeches and dialogues, though I found myself amused by Xenophon's increasingly self-righteous defenses of how he'd led the mercenaries. The fact that Xenophon wrote of himself in the third person, and originally under a pseudonym, adds to my snickering. Someone didn't like how his leadership was being spun by some political enemy or other, I'm guessing.
I'm glad I took the time to read Anabasis for myself; when a work has been adapted and reinterpreted in a variety of genres, it's a good idea to read the source material. Now if only I'd get on with reading The Tempest...
Translated by W. H. D. Rouse
214 pages
Written ca. 380 BC; translation published 1947
Read from March 1 to March 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I intend to work my way through more of the ancient and medieval classics. One of these days I want to slap together something of a roughly chronological "course" for myself, beginning with rereads of The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad and so forth, making progress into Greek comedies and histories and tragedies and such that I haven't yet read, but for now I'll content myself with picking up whatever comes to mind. When Roger Hill (who played Cyrus in The Warriors) died the other day, I figured it was time to get a copy of Xenophon's Anabasis.
Writers didn't develop the technique of leaving out irrelevant detail until well after the days of Daniel Defoe. My eyes glazed over the various marching stages early in Anabasis, and the battle descriptions weren't always clear (or, at any rate, I didn't take the time to parse out each actor and movement, because I can be lazy like that). I did enjoy the various speeches and dialogues, though I found myself amused by Xenophon's increasingly self-righteous defenses of how he'd led the mercenaries. The fact that Xenophon wrote of himself in the third person, and originally under a pseudonym, adds to my snickering. Someone didn't like how his leadership was being spun by some political enemy or other, I'm guessing.
I'm glad I took the time to read Anabasis for myself; when a work has been adapted and reinterpreted in a variety of genres, it's a good idea to read the source material. Now if only I'd get on with reading The Tempest...
Saturday, March 1, 2014
2014 read #22: AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller.
AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller
336 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 27 to March 1
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
All I want from a hiking narrative is precisely that: a hiking narrative. This book comes closest to that seemingly straightforward ideal, providing an almost day-by-day account of Miller's 2003 thru-hike -- in fact, Miller's recounting becomes almost tedious, a repetition of getting up, eating oatmeal, walking however many miles up and down hills and mountains, maybe going into town to stay at a bunkhouse and consume a lot of calories. The text is largely pieced together from the online trail journal he maintained at the time, so when the tedium of a particular segment got under his skin, you can feel it for yourself. Miller's prose doesn't scintillate; I'd put his skills as a writer just barely above David Brill, below Suzanne Roberts and Dan White, and well below Cheryl Strayed and Bill Bryson. What keeps me from giving this a higher score isn't his prose (which is serviceable), it's his tendency to shoehorn economic libertarianism into a book about a goddamned hike.
Okay, so Miller really only devotes three or four pages directly to his economic views. At one point, apropos of getting a ride from someone, he compares having the government pay for college to the totalitarian control of Romanian Communism. Toward the end he devotes two pages to a rant on having to pay thousands of dollars in taxes, and deciding to quit his job in part because he was getting taxed to death. (People who complain about this baffle me; in my entire life I've had to pay extra on tax day exactly once, and that was rectified simply by adding one more dependent on my withholding form. If you're paying so much extra at the end of the year, you must be in some rarefied tax bracket I can barely conceive of. Miller also hints at -- but never explicitly states -- the myth that earning more means you take home less, because the government likes to punish initiative or something. We have a progressive tax system, where each base income level is taxed only so much, so this is mathematically impossible, but it's a popular myth/talking point all the same.) The ideological derails don't have to be as head-scratching as that to be noticeable. The entire book is suffused with the sort of privilege that willfully conflates starting out with privilege with the quasi-heroic ideal of being a self-made man. It's a popular myth in our culture, one Miller worships even as his wife takes care of their kids at home, as trail town residents let him sleep in their basements, as organizations and volunteers maintain the trail and feed him and give him rides and buy the land he walks on. Even, dare I say it, as he traverses the nation's longest national park corridor itself. Nope, this hike is all about David Miller and getting away from that mean ol' IRS for a summer to be a real man, a free man (who just happens to be traversing government land we all helped buy for him).
There are certain political issues you would expect to permeate a thru-hike narrative. Just about every book will have at least a token chapter on conservation and ecology. (This is actually a rather glaring omission in AWOL.) If the writer is a woman, there will inevitably be material on the dangers women face from the human fauna along the trail. Miller's political content was slight, to be sure, but all the more glaring because of how little place it had in a trail narrative. His privileged "It's such a struggle to have to pay taxes" attitude soured me on what otherwise would have been a pretty darn good hiking narrative.
336 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 27 to March 1
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
All I want from a hiking narrative is precisely that: a hiking narrative. This book comes closest to that seemingly straightforward ideal, providing an almost day-by-day account of Miller's 2003 thru-hike -- in fact, Miller's recounting becomes almost tedious, a repetition of getting up, eating oatmeal, walking however many miles up and down hills and mountains, maybe going into town to stay at a bunkhouse and consume a lot of calories. The text is largely pieced together from the online trail journal he maintained at the time, so when the tedium of a particular segment got under his skin, you can feel it for yourself. Miller's prose doesn't scintillate; I'd put his skills as a writer just barely above David Brill, below Suzanne Roberts and Dan White, and well below Cheryl Strayed and Bill Bryson. What keeps me from giving this a higher score isn't his prose (which is serviceable), it's his tendency to shoehorn economic libertarianism into a book about a goddamned hike.
Okay, so Miller really only devotes three or four pages directly to his economic views. At one point, apropos of getting a ride from someone, he compares having the government pay for college to the totalitarian control of Romanian Communism. Toward the end he devotes two pages to a rant on having to pay thousands of dollars in taxes, and deciding to quit his job in part because he was getting taxed to death. (People who complain about this baffle me; in my entire life I've had to pay extra on tax day exactly once, and that was rectified simply by adding one more dependent on my withholding form. If you're paying so much extra at the end of the year, you must be in some rarefied tax bracket I can barely conceive of. Miller also hints at -- but never explicitly states -- the myth that earning more means you take home less, because the government likes to punish initiative or something. We have a progressive tax system, where each base income level is taxed only so much, so this is mathematically impossible, but it's a popular myth/talking point all the same.) The ideological derails don't have to be as head-scratching as that to be noticeable. The entire book is suffused with the sort of privilege that willfully conflates starting out with privilege with the quasi-heroic ideal of being a self-made man. It's a popular myth in our culture, one Miller worships even as his wife takes care of their kids at home, as trail town residents let him sleep in their basements, as organizations and volunteers maintain the trail and feed him and give him rides and buy the land he walks on. Even, dare I say it, as he traverses the nation's longest national park corridor itself. Nope, this hike is all about David Miller and getting away from that mean ol' IRS for a summer to be a real man, a free man (who just happens to be traversing government land we all helped buy for him).
There are certain political issues you would expect to permeate a thru-hike narrative. Just about every book will have at least a token chapter on conservation and ecology. (This is actually a rather glaring omission in AWOL.) If the writer is a woman, there will inevitably be material on the dangers women face from the human fauna along the trail. Miller's political content was slight, to be sure, but all the more glaring because of how little place it had in a trail narrative. His privileged "It's such a struggle to have to pay taxes" attitude soured me on what otherwise would have been a pretty darn good hiking narrative.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)