2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2023 read #24: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Afterword by Jeanette Winterson

154 pages

Published 1977

Read March 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for years. I first learned about it in the works of Robert Macfarlane, who in all his books has been a tireless evangelist for The Living Mountain. Unsurprisingly, he appears to have been instrumental in bringing it back into print. Characteristically rambling and allusive, Macfarlane’s introductory essay insists on preparing the way for Shepherd’s words for almost thirty pages, including references -- nearly a third as long as Shepherd's entire text.

It would be difficult for any book to live up to that kind of fevered promotion. The Living Mountain, however, is an impressive book. The neglected human art of getting to know a particular place in deep, all-season detail, of finding new perspectives and new revelations in familiar grounds, of finding that Zen-like poise of bodily awareness of the elemental landscape, soars and floods through Shepherd's precise and beautiful prose.

I've never gotten to know a place as well as Shepherd got to know her native Cairngorms, but I've come close to that meditative natural transcendence often enough in the past that my body responded almost physically to her descriptions. It is a gorgeous book, equally at home with the transcendental writings of the early 20th century as it is with the modern British art of landscape essay. 

2019 read #15: Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.

Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.

Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.

2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.

Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.

As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.

That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.

2016 read #76: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated by Lewis Galantière
229 pages
Published 1939
Read from September 30 to October 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

On one hand, it is fascinating to observe the enduring themes and imagery of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince -- childish openness to wonder and imagination, the delicate beauty and sorrow of mortality, individual beings adrift about the universe on isolated planets -- anticipated here in his memoirs, arising from his experiences in the air and on the ground in the years between the World Wars. On the other hand, Wind, Sand and Stars precipitates the inevitable disillusionment that comes from discovering that an author was the product of his time, mummified in the same casual racial and gendered prejudices of his contemporaries.

Stars is most engaging when Saint-Exupéry is in flight, with his precise descriptions of night navigation and the upper wilderness of clouds suggesting the universe of tiny planets explored by the Little Prince. The closing chapter, a series of sketches from the Spanish Civil War illustrating his philosophy of that ineffable "Spirit," the sense of wonderment and awareness, that turns men into men, is effective stuff as well -- even if his philosophy is little more than a weedy patch of Romanticism, blooming late in the Modernist age, decrying the soulless world of clerks and factories and extolling the virtues of science, art, and rural peasantry. What sets Saint-Exupéry apart from most romantics (in my admittedly meager experience) is his esthetic and philosophical appreciation for invention. An airplane or a locomotive or a factory is merely a tool, its value or its worthlessness determined by how well it serves a man and Man -- and to what ends.

The language is, of course, purposefully gendered: Women, in Saint-Exupéry's proto-Hemingwayan world, are coquettes and objects to be won, hearth-tenders to come home to, beacons for the lost adventurers to find their way home. Observing two women fortifying a Communist roadblock in Spain, he makes sure to note that they don't seem to know how to hold their rifles. The chapter on "Men of the Desert" indulges in some colonialist notions, including a long description of the "contentment" an enslaved Senegalese man feels. I take that a tiny bit out of context -- the passage is part of a larger philosophical musing on the "crippling" effects of a "humdrum life" and captivity, relating to depictions of commuting clerks at either end of the book -- but the stench of colonial power pervades the entire chapter.

2016 read #68: The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Translated by Alexandra Keeble
Prefaces by Aleida Guevara March, introduction by Cintio Vitier
175 pages
Published 1995; English translation published 2003
Read from August 29 to September 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

My first exposure to Che was in a Hot Topic. It was 2002, and I was 19; having gone directly from an abusive childhood into the army, self-expression was still a new concept for me. One weekend, on break from training, I went with my then-friend to the mall, and after our customary Saturday Cinnabon I ventured into the Hot Topic, where I saw a shirt in a blinding shade of red, emblazoned with the cliched image of Che's face. I was struck by, but at that age unable to articulate, the fine irony of a symbol of rebellion and revolution commoditized and sold to teenagers from a franchise shopfront. That was my rationale for purchasing it over the protests and disbelief of my army friend (who would, of course, go on to be a racist conservative asshole later in life). Over the ensuing months, after my own political awakening, I wore it with proud new layers of irony on the army bases where I was stationed -- a further irony, one I didn't appreciate until later, being my own utter ignorance of Che.

Che himself, as a man and as a symbol, was someone I hadn't thought much about beyond that initial set of ironies. His existence, actions, and ideology seem to be crushed beneath the weight of Che the symbol. To the regressives of the world, he's a hypocrite and a war criminal, guilty of vast (and usually vague) atrocities; to certain segments of the ever-divided left, he's a martyred saint, his every word dissected for hidden wisdom, as in the hagiographic introduction to this volume. Not to get all "the truth is in the middle" here, but in this instance, I'm pretty sure the reality is not close to either of those extremes.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating introduction to the young man who existed before the myth, a polished and edited "journal" of a bumbling expedition, by motorbike and by hitch, across several Latin American nations in 1952. The formative effect this had upon young Che's outlook, priorities, and ideology are obvious, though kept mostly between the lines; Che's tight-lipped indignation at the appalling poverty and class structures he encounters are the most interesting, and affecting, sections of the book. The rest, sadly, has something of a superficial feel to it. Despite the editorial efforts of an older Che (or possibly others), it feels obvious that this was a young student's travel diary, its tone alternately flippant and philosophical -- it would be easy to imagine, say, a college radio DJ writing something similar today, after a summer spent in search of "authenticity." Like a college dude, Che drops casual bits of homophobia and racial prejudice -- though, equally apropos, we could say "Like any dude in the 1950s." The travel portions tend toward the repetitive, fascinating interludes abbreviated in favor of enumerations of hunger, bad drivers, sleeping in police stations, and caging meals from reluctant, or naively enthusiastic, strangers.

It's a shame that Soviet-style Communism, in its day, was as corrupt and oligarchic, as reliant upon hegemonic colonialism, as capitalism has always tended to be. Through his writings, at least, it seems Che was a genuine revolutionary, a believer in the ideals he fought and eventually died for. This edition's appendix, taken from a speech Che gave to Havana medical students in 1960, is flush with revolutionary fervor, with utopian visions of "the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba." Like Che himself, the balance between social organization and individualism is ambiguous, multifaceted, perhaps impossible to resolve -- and certainly too ambitious for me to tackle in a simple book review.

2016 read #59: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 22 to July 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Much of the critical coverage I've seen relating to this book emphasized its role as a "word-hoard." At least one review gently chided Macfarlane for producing what at times amounts to a topographic dictionary; I put off reading Landmarks for months, in fact, persuaded that it sounded more apt as a reference volume than an edifying read. The word-hoards, however, make up only half of the raison d'être of this volume. Landmarks is equally if not more so a wayfinding exercise through Macfarlane's influences as a writer, a protracted argument by example in support of a particular school of nature writing. Many of the chapters began life as introductions to the foundational texts (and authors) Macfarlane visits. The visits range from moving epitaphs (the chapter on Roger Deakin) to cursory overviews that quickly veer away to different authors altogether (the "North-Minded" chapter begins as an ostensible examination of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams but spends far more words introducing Peter Davidson). Macfarlane produces some of his most precise and elegant prose in pursuit of these authors, but its beauty is often pulled up short by his subject matter -- a guided tour of a writer's favorite books, no matter how elegantly worded, is always going to carry the stigma of a listicle.

The word-hoard, in its turn, is fascinating, but so loaded with Gaelic words and regional synonyms for general terms that its usefulness to an outside writer is limited, except in its role as a prompt to imagination and specificity. Which, after all, is Macfarlane's central argument throughout Landmarks. Great nature writing demands precision of meaning; the culture-wide drain of that precise awareness of the natural world is what Macfarlane, in his own way, hopes to avert, or at least delay.

2016 read #57: Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent by a Distinguished Naturalist and His British Colleague by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher
427 pages
Published 1955
Read from July 17 to July 22
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

In my library's meager science section, there are few books that interest me that I haven't yet read. There are a fair number of primers on space or maths or volcanoes, quite a few pop-science cash-ins from journalists on the mediagenic controversies of the past fifteen years, and of course the inevitable pile of science biographies, but informative and non-sensationalized texts on life science, non-volcanic geology and Earth history, weather and climate, and so on are rather lacking (or, in some cases, merely outdated). It's a systemic problem in modern publishing, from what I can gather; the thirty-seventh book dissecting the personal theology of Charles Darwin will move more copies than an erudite and educational overview of plant and insect coevolution, because general readers are ignorant and have poor taste. (Sorry, the 2016 Republican National Convention just happened, and I'm feeling particularly gloomy about the wherewithal of the common American.)

One of the few interesting books I haven't already gobbled down is called Return to Wild America, by Scott Weidensaul, author of the overly imaginative yet compelling history The First Frontier. Weidensaul's Return was a Bush-era follow-up to none other than this here volume, commemorating its fiftieth anniversary. I'm something of a stickler (or stick in the mud) when it comes to doing my homework; I felt obligated to read Peterson and Fisher before I permitted myself Weidensaul. It wasn't merely a desire to do my due diligence, either -- an ecology book that merited a book-length revisit on its fiftieth anniversary sounded right up my alley, perhaps a classic work up there with A Sand County Almanac (or, at the very least, A Natural History of North American Trees).

Plus, how could I say no to reading a book that shared a title with my favorite PBS nature serial of the late 1980s?

It turns out that Wild America is... not very illuminating. The book is more of a 1950s road trip memoir, something like Travels with Charley but with birds instead of social commentary. The two authors play cute with some minor odd couple hijinks, run a running joke about Coca-Cola into the ground, offer some spiffy gee-whiz optimism about newfangled audio tours in museums and newfangled "rational exploitation" of fur seals in their breeding grounds, and in general careen about like two well-to-do white guys with a brand new car and three months to spare chasing birds for a living.

A good ecology book would tell you, the general reader, something about how each species might fit into its environment or make a broader point of scientific interest from the specific example. Even the aforementioned Natural History of American Trees delved into the ecology and life cycles of its subjects in fascinating ways, despite being little more than an extended index of tree species. Wild America, by contrast, offers little more than lists and basic descriptions of the birds the authors saw. There are times when the description of nature or scenery is evocative, almost seeming to deserve a revisit fifty years later, but for the most part, it reads like a birding checklist padded out with incidents of travel and casual condescension toward women, Indians, and Inuit. The result is very 1950s, like a prolonged National Geographic piece, a curious relic rather than a document with much to say to the present.

2016 read #49: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.

My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.

Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.

As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.

2016 read #45: Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane.

Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit by Robert Macfarlane
282 pages
Published 2003
Read from May 22 to May 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

After several false starts and abandoned novels in the second half of this month (so much for that splendid pace I'd been setting!), I was more than eager to get started on this one. I've been trying to obtain Mountains of the Mind for well over a year now, probably ever since I finished The Old Ways and felt myself hankering for more from Macfarlane. I'm somewhat impressed by his works, primarily The Wild Places, and everything I knew about Mountains suggested it would be a worthwhile read. A sociological history on how people (well, Western Europeans, at any rate) conceptualize and respond to mountainous terrain intrigued both my anthropological side and my outdoorsy side; Macfarlane's byline promised the cachet of his often-fluent nature writing. That extra year or so while I waited for the library network to act upon my book request only added to my anticipation.

For all that buildup, Mountain proves to be... pretty much alright? The thesis statement of the bold opening chapter, promising nothing less than a history of landscape perception across several centuries, is the best part of the book -- an appropriate parallel to Macfarlane's theme of the romantic pull of the unknown, mystery and suggestion rendering to the imagination scenes to which reality is a disappointing substitute. He covers the West's progression of concepts and ideas regarding mountains well enough, chapter by chapter, but the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking, little serving to distinguish it from any number of history books. Macfarlane's later prose brilliance is only suggested here in the occasional bit of wordplay.

2016 read #35: The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 26 to April 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I kept seeing this book on "best book of the year" lists, so I went into it with unrealistic expectations. Wulf explores a fascinating period of intellectual development, the cusp between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, and Humboldt himself is a significant character well deserving of scrutiny and publicity. Wulf traces Humboldt's influence on the thinking and work of historical figures ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Simón Bolívar to John Muir, and on movements ranging from conservation and environmentalism to Art Nouveau and nature writing. It is a perfectly serviceable scientific biography, providing far more scientific and contemporary context than Chrysalis, for example, but I've been spoiled lately by history books written with considerably more verve and personality. Invention is written in what I would call the default historical biography voice: informative, bland, interchangeable. It lacks the snarkiness of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the authoritative skepticism of SPQR, the imaginative flourishes of The Witches. Wulf's prose flows well but tends to be as bland as noodles.

2016 read #26: Walking on the Wild Side by Kristi M. Fondren.

Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail by Kristi M. Fondren
143 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 29 to March 30
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

This one is a bit of an oddity, both as a book on the Appalachian Trail and within the context of my recent (post-college) reading habits. I found it during one of my periodic searches through the Suffolk County library catalog for new-to-me hiking narratives. Outwardly, Walking on the Wild Side is packaged as if it were yet another trail memoir, with an "outdoorsy" font, a generic title that could apply to just about any AT narrative, and a cover photograph of booted feet propped up in leisurely contemplation of a view. With movie versions of Wild and A Walk in the Woods recently in theaters, I've been expecting a wave of copycat memoirs to peak sometime in the next year or two; I assumed Wild Side was the first to appear, and promptly put in an ILL request.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Wild Side, while no doubt packaged and marketed to capitalize on the copycat wave, is actually a sociological study upon the subculture of long-distance hiking upon the Appalachian Trail, the result of interviews and participant observation. I almost discarded the book upon this discovery, before my own academic instincts reemerged from hibernation (my BA is in anthropology) and I found myself unable to resist that dry, dry thesis prose. It was almost like discovering an old favorite pair of shoes in a closet, and finding them still comfy.

As is often the case with sociological research (and with science in general), Fondren merely takes the time to properly document aspects of the long-distance hiking subculture that were already obvious to anyone who's read the memoirs and watched the YouTube vlogs. Proper documentation is nothing to be sniffed at, and to be fair, Fondren expands upon certain behaviors and places them within a sociological context, which I found illuminating. Academic works tend to err in the direction of scrupulously contextualizing any statement or assertion, which can make for dull or repetitive reading, but it's a useful practice, and in any case, Wild Side was a brief read. What makes it odd is how Rutgers University Press is so evidently trying to market this dry and rather niche study in order to cash in on the current long-distance hiking craze, even going so far as to have various professors awkwardly attempt to provide blurbs for the back cover. ("Upon finishing a chapter, the reader is anxious to move on to the next one," raves Professor Alan Graefe of Penn State.) The trick worked on me, and it worked on Suffolk County, whose libraries (which typically avoid university press type material) have obtained four copies and counting, so I guess I can't fault them. It just seems like an unexpected move for a university press, because it's, well, a trick.

2016 read #21: On the Beaten Path by Robert Alden Rubin.

On the Beaten Path: An Appalachian Pilgrimage by Robert Alden Rubin
238 pages
Published 2000
Read from March 22 to March 23
Rating: ★½ out of 5

It's easy to pick out a proverbial A-list of long-hike narratives: Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods -- both big bestsellers, both turned into movies, both with general audience appeal (Strayed's Oprah-ready story of climbing up from rock bottom, Bryson's Brysonesque humor) and noticeable cultural impact. It helps that there are, to my knowledge, only two such books. Separating the B-list from the C-list is more subjective, a matter of taste as much as a calculus of publishing house cachet, promotional effort, copies sold, and so on. I'd say Almost Somewhere, I Promise Not to Suffer, and The Cactus Eaters are securely on the B-list, at least demonstrating an effort toward general readership, while The Wild Birds' Song and AWOL on the Appalachian Trail are confirmed C-listers, doggedly niche, making no pretense at telling a broader, relatable life story beyond "There's this trail and I wanted to hike it."

I made up this categorization system on the spot for this review in order to have a new angle to discuss yet another hiking book: On the Beaten Path, put out by some no-name press (currently a subsidiary of Globe-Pequot, pumping out the likes of Hemingway's Guns and Mark Twain for Cat Lovers), with no driving personal narrative beyond "I was depressed and didn't like my job, so I quit to hike the AT," slots comfortably within the C-listers. Hypothetically, its author could have the makings of a better or bolder writer than other C-listers, but the problem is, he knows it -- and he seems to think he's a better writer than he actually is, to boot. (Not a hiking pun. Okay, maybe it is.) I almost quit Path in the first chapter, where Rubin goes on at length (that length: two entire pages of text) about the origins of his trail name, Rhymin' Worm, which originated as a gimmick account on a poetry message board -- a fact which still seems to impress Rubin with its cleverness. Perhaps I'm more blasé about such wonders than were the wide-eyed poets and netizens of the late '90s. Regardless, I don't think anybody, then or now, on or off the trail, needed samples of the Rhymin' Worm's doggerel "Ballad."

I came even closer to pitching the damn thing aside early in chapter two, when I encountered the line, "Who is this intrepid Rhymin' Worm of ours?" That's just pure canned corn right there. At that point, huffing at the page, reaching the end in this Rhymin' Worm's company seemed as out of my reach as the summit of Katahdin seems to an office-soft hiker on the Springer approach trail. Couldn't I just quietly stuff it into the library's return slot and await my next ILL'd hiking narrative?

Yet, countering that impulse: it's spring now, and I'm restless, eager for the woods and the rocks and all the momentary marvels of hiking. I've watched all the competently produced hiking videos on YouTube, and alas, I'm starting to run out of unread thru-hike books as well (or at least those contained in the Suffolk County library system). I resolved to tough out even the most tedious trudge through Rubin's supposed cleverness. Maybe there would be little rewards along the way, peeks at fiddleheads and the clean smell of damp leaves. Maybe it would all be worthwhile.

There are a few such moments: gazing at Comet Hale-Bopp above the summits of Georgia, the colorful rise of spring, a rainy night in a Vermont barn. But even after the worst of his cornball flourishes have been spent, Rubin is an unpleasant hiking companion. He exudes judgy negativity in a way I've never seen in a published first-person adventure story. Even Bill Bryson turned his signature misanthropy into something funny. Rubin indulges in bare-all psychological confessionism, but unlike Cheryl Strayed, the wounds he exhibits really aren't that interesting. He portrays himself as alternately seething and moping his way up the Appalachian spine -- and as a bigot on top of everything else. After hiking companionably for some distance with a trail buddy, Rubin suddenly has qualms about continuing on with him after learning the man is gay. He fumes for days (and pages of manuscript) after finding a bible burnt in a shelter. Rubin seldom stints a negative word about anyone else he encounters, except for one fellow sad middle-aged man with a dusting of literary pretension. Imagine that.

I suppose Path could be taken as an antidote to the golly-gee positivity of so much other trail literature, a warning of the psychological toil, the trudgery typically glossed over in other books with a few anecdotes of heavy packs and snoring companions. That, however, doesn't make it more of a joy to read.

2016 read #18: Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage.

Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage
289 pages
Published 2013 (British edition published 2012)
Read from March 12 to March 13
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

From the glowing, sylvan, almost mythological optimism of Roger Deakin, and the more measured, philosophical cadences of Robert Macfarlane -- not to mention the golden light and luminous rains of my trip to Ireland, seven years ago and still my only venture off this continent -- I've become something of an Anglophile, in the sense that I've developed a long distance love affair with this idealized conception of England, and the British Isles generally. The subtitle of the British edition of this book, Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, would have hooked me in and gotten me reading it a lot sooner than its watered-down American sobriquet. Poets or troubadours make no difference to me; it's the bit about tramping the Pennine Way that would have reeled me in.

In that sense, it's interesting that Walking Home is the first book in my reading history that depicts something less than an idealized experience, both of hiking a long-distance path and of the ostensibly "wild" places of the English countryside. Where Deakin finds tranquil immersion in the unlikeliest fens and urban waterways, and Macfarlane finds pockets of the wild in every hedgerow, Armitage acknowledges the intrusion of the modern into the remotest moors. Towers and radar domes and farms turned junkyards are the mileposts of his walk, drenching somewhat my immediate reaction of "I simply must hike the Pennine Way someday!" Armitage's walk is measured by poetry readings, and his perception of the world picks up people and human concerns; the journey is essentially the spine of his book, while the pages crowd with personalities and nightly counts of donations at the door. You can just sense that heath and moor and rock and fog is not where Armitage, given his druthers, would rather be. Which makes this something of a unique narrative in my experience, approaching it as I do with the canons of hiking books and English nature writing as my compass points.

I'm no judge of poetry, so I can't rate the occasional poem Armitage includes. They didn't do much for me, for the most part. And his prose, while certainly adequate, doesn't have the warmth and beauty of Deakin's or Macfarlane's or Helen Macdonald's -- perhaps because he isn't so clearly infatuated with the scenes he depicts. The anecdotes and asides are funny, but the book as a whole has a middling feel, almost a sense of a big project planned in advance and then completed with flagging enthusiasm, much like Armitage's hike itself.

2016 read #4: The Wild Birds' Song by Jim Coplen.

The Wild Birds' Song: Hiking South on the Appalachian Trail by Jim Coplen
183 pages
Published 1998
Read January 8
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

In a time when hiking videos, some of good quality, document thru-hikes of various long trails, is there really any point to the long-distance hiking narrative anymore? Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods made a fine comic spectacle of it, Cheryl Strayed's Wild made an Oprah-ready memoir of recovery out of it, Dan White made us stare at his ex-girlfriend's ass in The Cactus Eaters -- but is there any need, now, for a backpacking tale that isn't buttressed by some pseudo-literary gimmick? After spending last autumn, and the winter so far, watching countless hours of hiking on YouTube, courtesy of the likes of Will "Red Beard" Wood and Joe Brewer, I'm no longer convinced that books like The Wild Birds' Song serve a purpose, not when I can get my daydream fix with GoPro color and sound.

I'm sure this book must have been more of a novelty when it was published. Heck, even two years ago, this would have been more of a novelty for me, personally. It's no fault of Coplen's that his narrative now seems flimsy and inessential, a mildly diverting way to spend the evening and little more. Back when this was written, a book like this was probably the only way most people could have a taste of day-to-day life on the Appalachian Trail. Now that we have people carting untold numbers of gizmos through the woods, a vlog (or a video diary -- does anyone say "vlog" anymore? is that a failed neologism?) is a much better fit for the vicarious thru-hike experience, which makes a book like this something of a quaint little relic.

2015 read #43: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel.

My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.

The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.

2015 read #41: Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck.

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.

I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.

2015 read #18: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
374 pages
Published 2012
Read from March 30 to April 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There was an unconformity (in the geological sense) between this book and me, or between what the author intended to write and what I hoped and expected to read. I was beguiled by Macfarlane's The Wild Places, so easily and thoroughly charmed by his style and perspective that I prematurely forecast that Macfarlane would "quickly become one of my favorite authors." The mismatch may well be on my end -- circumstances have forced me to read this book in snatches of stolen time, rarely more than fifteen or twenty pages in a go, and with prose this consciously elliptical (there's even a glossary elucidating the more niche terminology Macfarlane employs), and a thematic through-line this all-encompassing and attenuated, it's likely my attention was too scattershot and flighty to appreciate what Macfarlane was going for here.

The blame is not wholly mine, however: some rests with the publishers, or whomever composed the jacket flap copy: "In this exquisitely written book, an immediate bestseller in England, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes that crisscross the British landscape and its waters, connecting them to the continents beyond." I tend to avoid jacket flap copy, and that first sentence is admittedly all I read. But I could be excused for expecting a book about, well, Robert Macfarlane setting off on ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths crisscrossing Britain, a text exactly in line with my recent interest (inspired by The Wild Places as well as the books of Roger Deakin) in British rights of way and tramping culture. Macfarlane does set off on one such tramp early in the book, along the Icknield Way, but the actual thematic through-line is a quasi-biography of a certain poet, Edward Thomas, as well as a thesis on how memory, personality, and identity relate to environments and the experience of walking -- in his paraphrase of Thomas' lines of thought,

...self -- not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not simply there to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways -- both perplexing and perforating us.

It's all interesting enough when Macfarlane warms to these themes, but I don't think I forgave him for deviating from the path I'd expected to follow, and even his most evocative nature-writing felt lost on me.

Whether it was my own sense of disconnect, or whether this was indeed a lesser effort than The Wild Places, I didn't feel Macfarlane's prose was at the same level he produced for his debut work. His similes, while still bracingly original, often felt more strained than natural, and at times I couldn't quite suss out his meaning, especially when he left the ground for displays of philosophical scintillation. And this is a minor point, but I felt there's something disingenuous about a writer going off to Sichuan because he "couldn't think of anything I'd rather do" in one chapter, then in the next sneering about "trust funds." I'm sure it's great to be able to globe-trot on a whim while writing your next book, but having access to that kind of lucre should, as a rule, make it harder for you to offer "Trust fund kids, am I right?" comments.

2015 read #14: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
330 pages
Published 2007
Read from March 16 to March 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It was Roger Deakin who inspired my interest in books of eccentric (and, seemingly, ineluctably British) adventures in the proverbial backyard. His Waterlog documented his project to swim throughout the British Isles, "dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools," as I put it in that review, while his Wildwood lingered in coppices and took delight in nuts and berries and sunbeams. Knowing nothing of Robert Macfarlane when Amazon recommended this book to me, I seized upon The Wild Places to fill a hunger for domestic exploration that had been maturing ever since I finished Waterlog, a craving Three Men on a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel had failed to assuage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macfarlane and Deakin had become good friends in the last years of Deakin's life, and much of The Wild Places is imbued with Deakin's presence, his actions directly on the page or his example and inspiration like a warm light through eyelids. I only "know" Deakin through his own two books, and now through Macfarlane's depiction, but the chapters dealing with Deakin's death and Macfarlane's mourning have left me glum and heavy all day today.

Less eccentric, perhaps, than Deakin's quest in Waterlog, Macfarlane's project here is to discover any remnants of wildness left on the long-inhabited, recently-monocultured British archipelago. Beginning with the obvious wildernesses of the remote north, Macfarlane works his way toward more populated areas and a more intimate conception of what wildness might mean, finding (with Deakin) the wild in the limestone gryke microenvironments of the Burren and the forgotten holloways of the chalklands. Macfarlane's narration is also more conventional than what I recall of Deakin's sumptuous digressions, sticking close to his theme with beautiful but efficient prose, making for a faster but, perhaps, less beguiling and lingering read. Macfarlane's text also carries an undercurrent of melancholy, never approaching the gentle delight of Deakin's abbreviated career.

If his other books are like this one (and I've already ordered one more from ILL and one from Amazon), though, I can already tell Macfarlane will quickly become one of my favorite authors.

2014 read #50: West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
294 pages
Published 1942
Read from May 30 to June 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A girl grows up in colonial East Africa, hunting boar with a spear and a dog, finding her way into piloting aircraft and running a bush air service based in Nairobi, before becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic east to west from England to Nova Scotia. There's no way such a tale should be boring, and much of Markham's autobiography is absorbing in a quaint sort of way, but she spends so much time dwelling on horse training and patronizing affirmations of noble African purity and extended commentary on the perfidious nature of Italians that any given chapter is equally likely to inspire yawns. It comes with the time period, I suppose. I would have appreciated far more anecdotes about her colonial childhood or the bush piloting.