Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

I just read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The book chronicles the now infamous Chris McCandless, the young man that died during a romantic extended camping trip in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992.  His life has been much considered as there have been numerous essays about his life and motivations.

Here is the plot, briefly. Chris graduates Emory college with honors and defies his parents by not continuing onto Law School.  He instead decides to travel across the United States, taking on the moniker Alex Supertramp. His transition to independence from society is a slow one, as he spends a few years taking on odd jobs under the radar and finding shelter when it comes. His ideals (and ego) are fueled by the fictional loners penned by Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. He eventually hitchhikes up to Alaska to live off the wilderness with embarrassing low provisions. He dies after an impressive 112 days.

The book is written so carefully, so respectfully. The author frequently mentions other writers and outdoorsman who bash McCandless’s inexperience and arrogance who imply that such a lack of respect for nature deserves death. Krakauer goes completely the other way asking us to remember what it was like to be young and idealistic, when we were ready to die for our beliefs. Well, this young man did.

Chris dislikes his parents. The reasoning is abstract and I’m sure the actual relationship is more complicated than the book could even describe. What is for sure is that Chris didn’t have a solid reason to not like his parents. He grew up privileged with loving parents who gave him everything he ever needed and encouraged positive behaviors and life paths. It would be nice if there were a cut and dry reason for Chris to set out on his own, but there wasn’t. If it were me and I had the inkling to do a life adventure like that, I just wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously. That is definitely something Chris could do, and that was take himself seriously.

It is sad that he died. What makes it worse is that he was ready to go back into society with renewed vigor when he realized that he couldn’t. He planned out this romantic trip because he had a problem with his world view that made relationships unbearable. He planned a trip so he could get away from it all for while. And it worked. That’s the crazy part. It worked.  He felt more grateful for the things he had, he missed his family, and he was ready to enjoy being a productive member of society.

My only qualm with the book is that the author spends a little too much time talking about other explorers that met the same fate. He takes it too far  when the author includes his own climbing adventure to the list of other great blunders. That unnecessary portion made the exactly 200 page book a little irksome, like he was rushing to meet his page quota.  It doesn’t help that the few lines of text that the author managed to scrape up from McCandless’s post cards and diaries are repeated multiple times in the book, sometimes to exhaustion. I realize this was necessary to ground the timeline in a circular plot, but after reading the same post card for the 4^th time, it felt like just poor writing.

I definitely recommend this book. In a world where life is so cut and dry, where actions and consequences rule our every decision and foresight trumps every plan, it is amazing to read about someone who rejects the worldview of the ever shrinking room. Sure he dies. I bet that gives us the affirmation we need to stay trapped in our comfort zone. 

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

This is my first Nicholas Sparks novel, although I must admit that I cried like a baby while watching "The Notebook". (I also cried like a baby when I summarized The Notebook to my friend two days ago). I figured that I wanted to see what type of writing enchants the world population in the way that Sparks seems to do time and time again.

The book is about an ex-marine who walks across country to find a woman. This woman is special to him because she is in a lucky photograph he found in Iraq. The biggest conflict of the book is the woman's ex husband who unreasonably does not want her to date anyone else.

It was pretty enchanting. The ending was very powerful, jumping off of the page like a movie. The ending conflicted greatly with the robotic movements and flat dialog that plagued the rest of the book. It is as as if he wrote a rough draft of the book, then did a second draft of the last two chapters, then published it. 

I'm probably not the first to say that the conflict is flimsy. I will give Sparks some credit though, he certainly gives the exhausting and petty aspects of relationships the gravity that bored housewives probably want. I mean, I don't care about ex-husbands and I think Beth and Logan could have told Clayton to piss off from the beginning and live the rest of their lives in peace, but then again, I have never lived that life and I don't know how stressful that stuff can be.

I had one odd moment while reading this book. I thought "it is all a conspiracy". Sparks isn't a person, he is a program that distills field interviews from the target audience. In this case, it wrote a book that panders to single mothers who feel marginalized by their ex-husbands. What they want is to get love unconditionally without having to work for it. Preferably love will fit right into her life without her having to change anything, maybe he will work in the family business and not have any friends or family for her to deal with. Yup, Logan made a grand gesture of love before he even knew her. She doesn't have to feel good enough to deserve it, she just has to be the person in his photograph. It just seemed too perfect.

And he listened to her vent about her problems without judging her, interrupting her, or even trying to fix her. Sparks made a big point about that.


In Roger Ebert's review of the movie he writes

I've seen him in interviews where he's better-looking than some of his leading men and comes across as sincere. I think he really does believe in his stories, and I think readers sense that.

I bet Ebert got the pandering feeling that compelled him to write this. 

But it was enchanting nonetheless. Maybe robots will write all our books, and we'll be better for it.

Other Notes:
- I sensed this with the late Michael Crichton's work near the end of his career, namely Prey. Editors get insecure and don't push enough when the authors get too famous. The authors just assume that everyone will love the book and it will be turned into a movie. All this causes the books to sound like screenplays. Scenes get grander (with more water) and only actions are described. The author abandons  point of view all together.
-  One plot hole: When everyone is rushing to save the son, how did Clayton know that the tree house was dangerous? He wasn't involved in that at all. Him running out to help was also uncharacteristic. 
- I grew uncomfortable when everyone started calling Clayton simply "the ex". I doubt everyone in the entire town would call him that. It showed me that he didn't have voices ironed out. I just don't think Nana would call him that.
- the cliffhanger being resolved in the epilogue was cute, I liked that.
- This is the first review where I didn't spoil the ending. let me know if you want to know what happened.

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Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I bought my copy of the Hunger Games at target for $7.19. After the first few chapters I worried I accidentally bought the dumbed-down discount version. Perhaps that acute sense of an overly pedagogic tone was my fault. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a book meant for the YA audience.  In that respect, the book performed wonderfully, almost brilliantly, as it laid out a story just gruesome enough to be fascinating, and just angsty enough to be relatable by someone who is just about to grow out of it.

 I am sure you know what the Hunger Games is about by now. The movie had the third highest grossing movie of all time. The book takes place in a far future when North America has been rearranged by a civil war into a Capitol and 12 outlying districts that support it. The districts are poor and the Capitol works hard to suppress them. One of their suppression tools is something called the Hunger Games, a romanesque game where 24 children have to fight to the death while the whole country watches.


I can see why teenagers go gaga over this stuff. Adults see the hunger games as a metaphor for the voyeurism that is our media, but I can tell the analogy hits a lot closer to home. The book is all about being watched, and the attempt to behave accordingly while you know that everyone around you is your potential enemy. That sounds a lot like MY high school, at least.

The movie missed surprisingly few things. One of which was Katniss's personal growth. She started the book with the assurance that she was a powerful young woman by the ability to support her family. She ended the book with the realization that sometimes she didn't understand her own feelings. The other thing the movie left out, quite  brilliantly I might add, was the last 40 pages of the book. The last 40 pages of the book acted as a segue to what I believe will be the drama in the second book. It would look silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie if they never made another one. The last 40 pages were about were where you realize that in the arena you at least that there were rules. There is no telling what can happen outside of the arena, when you don't have the assurance of a caring audience to keep things humane.

A notes on onw the books potential flaws. I don't understand her relationship with Cinna. That was one of the things I was looking forward to understanding after watching the movie. They seem to have such a deep and loving relationship without apparently having ever having anything to bind them together.

Overall it was quite fun to be wrapped up in the popular fiction hype. I look forward to my review of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson

I don't know where I heard about this book. I don't think I know anyone who as read it. Despite all this, I bought this paperback copy from Target because I felt like Everyone was reading it. Four days later, I don't feel cheated. This book offered wonderfully griping suspense, damaged heroes, and despicable villains. Hundreds of pages passed seemingly with a blink of the eye.

The tale is about Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist that writes a story about a high powered CEO, and loses a trial because of it. He risks damaging the magazine of which he was a founder. A rich company owner takes advantage of his dire situation and asks him to help solve a murder that happened 40 years ago. New evidence is brought to light and events occur that lead Mikael to believe that it may not be such a cold case after all. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Besides, the plot is so intricate that explaining it might take as much space as the actual book.

What makes the book stand out aside from the compelling plot are the characters. The book offers two heroes. The girl with the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, a tough little young adult with major social disabilities. She has a stellar mind which she applies to investigative research, but she also has a repellent attitude that hints at an interesting back story. The lead male is adequately sharp when it comes to negotiations, but an idiot when it comes to women. 

I'm not saying that the book was perfect. Here are my chief complaints.

- It may be a low blow, but its awfully hard to read about something that happened in Sweden. Its unfortunate that my only experience with swedish language is from Ikea, but it has tainted my experience in ways the book can not help. Everytime I read the name of a city, I think of a delightful paper lamp.  I have no idea how to pronounce an umlaut. Its come to the point where everytime a swedish word is written, my eyes skim the word. If a reader skims words too often, their eyes will start to glaze over the page. Getting over the first 50 pages without being completely glazed over was the hardest hurdle in reading this book.

- The plot ebbed and flowed nicely, but when the mystery ended, I didn't care much about the corporate revenge. The Big Reveal should have happened at the end. As it stands now, the last 100 pages are a whisper.

- I see that the theme may have been about the hatred of women. I can't draw any conclusion about this. It seems that some women are poor murder victims and some just need to be beaten. At the end, did we find out that Mikael too hated women? I can't tell.

- Making up a situation where a forty year old murder could be so adequately documented and still solvable is brilliant. The village was isolated on an island with a blocked road, and everyone in town was photographed multiple times on a particular day. The fact that the solution lied outside of this hermetically sealed space felt cheap. How could I have guessed that?

All and all a good read. The book was 600 pages long, but I finished it casually in a couple of hours. I see amazon has copies for a 5 spot now. I can say that is an amazing value for this satisfying experience.