Why are the best-selling hiking memoirs all written by quitters?
Just going to leave this here...
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...o-the-distance
Because we learn more from failure than success, perhaps.Originally Posted by spvceman
An interesting review. I'd guess in Bryson's case, because he's just a great writer with a sense of humor I enjoy. As for Cheryl Strayed's book (Wild) I think it's as much about her personal story as her hike.
While the author's reaction to his first reading of A Walk in the Woods is not atypical, many if not most hikers I talk to who read it think it's funny and enjoyed it. And his quoting Bryson saying "We hiked the Appalachian Trail" is misleading and out-of-context. Prior to that statement, Bryson expresses very clearly that he did not hike the entire trail and he profoundly admires anyone who did. In this section of the book, he points out, rightly, that he hiked 900 miles. That's certainly more than most of the quitters, especially in the era that he hiked.
Also, the author mentions that Bryson skipped the "northern part of Virginia" is misleading if not erroneous. Bryson may have skipped the short northernmost part from Front Royal to VA but the major area of skipping was the southern part, south of Daleville all the way to Tennessee.
As for why Bryson's book was such a best seller, the obvious answer is that he was an established author - and a popular one. If A Walk in the Woods was his first book, it wouldn't even crack the top 10 of AT-oriented books.
Finally, the author said he resolved to hike the trail the "right" way which he meant thru-hike. Well excuse me, but we section hikers who covered the trail over many years (in my case decades) were just as "right." This topic comes up from time-to-time on WB but I venture to say that the solid majority of WBers do not consider thru-hiking the only "right" way to hike the AT.
PS - the second-best seller by an AT hiker is AWOL's AWOL on the Appalachian Trail - definitely not a quitter!
Bryson needed to write a book. once he had enough for a book, why keep going !
I'm so confused, I'm not sure if I lost my horse or found a rope.
Because hiking causes irreparable brain damage.
Just kidding. It was the best wild guess I could come up with.
In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. - Abraham Lincoln
Good article, but why is it everyone seems to embellish
I mean really. is it even remotely possible that "others" -- which I am sure the author realizes means more than one-- have lined up their shoes that way?Certain thru-hikers, referred to as “purists,” take this emphasis on continuity to obsessive lengths. Some touch or kiss every blaze of white paint along the trail, while others carefully line up their shoes, like Japanese slippers, in the precise spot they entered a lean-to, so as to know exactly where to resume hiking the next day.
And some -- or for that matter any one -- have kissed every -- or for that matter a whole bunch -- of blazes along the trail.
The thing that sucks is that the trail has so many real and really amazing stories-- it's getting harder to worth them out, I think.
I'm pretty sure that the notion of thru hiking was not part of the original vision of the trail.
I read through about 2000 pages of AT journals before attempting a thru-hike in 1990. Journals from thru-hiking history -- Earl Shaffer, Eric Ryback, Ed Garvey, Dorothy Parker, et. al. (That 2-volume Rodale Press anthology.)
Not one of those diaries made me laugh out loud the way Bryson's book did when it came out in '98 or so. Though Bryson's account is chock full of hyperbole, I think it is in many ways far more honest and truthful than all of those "straightforward" accounts.
There's something about Bryson's writing style that appeals to many... and turns off others.
Sure, and it makes for entertaining prose in the New Yorker for this former thru hiker to write about some hikers kissing every white blaze, or some thru hikers carefully lining up their shoes like Japanese slippers in a shelter so they would start the next day exactly where they left off.
That is bull**** of course, but are stories that may well have sprung from a kernel of reality. But is tha good enough?
Some writers -- Paul Theroux comes to mind -- are able to take real experience (presumably) and add personal observation and context to make that reality funny. That takes a very special talent, however.
Making up up these stories -- or bending the truth to great extent -- requires much less skill, and in the end is not nearly as satisfying. The good news is that they are just making up stories about a trail, and not ones about battles and personal honor and stuff that matters.
Except that to some -- a very small minority -- the real stories of the AT do matter.
Bryson, to his credit, makes it clear that he is making a lot of his **** up-- but always with the subtext that it is largely accurate. For that, I give him a B- at best.
As as for the writer of the New Yorker article, I probably should wait until his book come out , but based on his article in the magazine, I would have sent it back for a rewrite-- were I the editor.
But hell, he got published and that is all that matters, right?
There can only be one reason: Thru-hikers are boring.
How many sawed-off toothbrushes have you actually seen on the trail, rick? Yet that's long been part of the lore.
Several more re-reads of the article have increased further my disdain for this author - both his style and substance.
To answer his posed question "Why are the best-selling hiking memoirs all written by quitters," he offers three long-winded explanations having to do with story line, the cleverness of the writing combined with the author's inexperience - in short the quality of the writing as moving beyond the boring doldrums of day-by-day trail life. But as I stated previously, he ignores the most cogent and obvious answer: all three of the authors were established writers who started with a built-in base of loyal readers.
Having recently authored a hiking book myself, I've learned a great deal in the last few years about the entire process, a process that boils down to 2 major phases: (1) writing the book; and (2) marketing the book. For any subject, not just hiking, one could have produced the most brilliant, original, insightful, humorous, entertaining, penetrating book in years, but if it's his/her first book, it's likely to go nowhere, especially if it's self-published. Marketing is more than hard, time-consuming work; it takes connections to attain the visibility required to make a best seller list. If you manage to persuade a publisher to take on your book, your price for having a marketing team is ceding some control over your product, to say nothing of more parties dividing up the pie of royalties.
As established authors, Bryson, Strayed, and Coehlo had publishers. They also had visibility. When I was taking my book around to book stores and outfitters in Colorado, one bookstore owner told me I needed to get on Oprah if I wanted this to become a best seller because that's what Cheryl Strayed did with Wild. Note that this bookseller said nothing about the quality of writing, whether I told a strict narrative or embellished, whether I was humorous or creative. It was all about visibility. And authors like me need visibility because we're nobodies. If Stephen King or J.K.Rowling decided to hike the AT and write a book about it, their book would be an instant best seller regardless of whether they finished the trail and regardless of the quality of their prose.
I'm amazed that Robert Moor, the author of this article, doesn't understand this. Unlike sports where the best rise to the top on merit, writing - along with acting, art, and music - is not a field where quality correlates with fame and riches. Bill Bryson writes well and is particularly well-known for humor, but the humor in Dennis Blanchard's 300 Zeroes is at least as creative and laugh-producing as A Walk in the Woods. However, 300 Zeroes is self-published and (sorry to say) and lacks the professional appearance that would grace a book written by an established author with a publisher. Cheryl Strayed's life events intertwined with her hike narrative may make for a more interesting story line than a dry day-by-day hiking journal but not all AT books fit this latter stereotype. Robert Rubin's On the Beaten Path is very well-written account in which his personal struggles - on and off the trail - are expertly woven into the hike narrative. This is no surprise since Rubin is a professional editor himself. But as skilled as his writing is, and having a publisher to direct the marketing, Rubin was not a household name among the reading public in the same manner as Bryson.
I'll just reiterate what I said earlier: if Bryson wrote the same book after the same hike at the same time but it was his first book, it wouldn't have approached the best seller list. He probably couldn't even have gotten a publisher.
Bill, having read your book and Bryson's, here's my take. It's clear from your book that you knew what you were getting into. You were fit, experienced, well prepared. You'd done your homework. There were few surprises. And therein lies the problem, at least from a literary point of view.
With Bryson, the reader gets to discover the trail bit by bit, in a rather rude and abrupt manner. Not the best way to hike, perhaps, but a good deal more entertaining. There's an element of surprise. It's a story, not a reference work. It's an emotional roller-coaster, just like the real trail.
Please forgive the following comparison. My final long section hike on the AT was a bit like your CT hike -- plenty of experience behind me, well planned, diligently executed, and not terribly exciting. Adventure involves risks and unknowns and unexpected turns. In retrospect, I think I may have over-engineered it.
On a different note -- one thing I get from most of the "canonical" journals (eg. Garvey, Shaffer, et. all) is the absolute suppression of all doubt as to the eventual completion of the journey. Failure is not contemplated. There's not much discussion or insight about the low points, the annoyances, the boredom and tedium that drive most thru-hiker wannabees off the trail. That's where Bryson's account differs from the rest -- and in that way, it's a more honest account than most.
Rafe,my only challenge to your response is the last paragraph because out of the 70-odd books written by AT hikers, I can't believe that all of them express the same degree of certainty of their hike's eventual success. I've only read about a half-dozen but again, I cite the aforementioned Robert Rubin as a counterexample to your premise, i.e. he did discuss the low points, annoyances, boredom, tedium etc. Rubin's hike was definitely an emotional roller coaster. I've got to think that at least some of the other books did as well.
I will say that one thing I liked about Bryson was how he described the Park Service, Forest Service, and AT history so candidly. For example, I always thought the ATC downplayed the disputes and differences between MacKaye and Avery, but Bryson told it like it is
Regarding my own hike and book, I acknowledge both in the body and the "Reflections" chapter that there were more than a few unexpected surprises about my hike; in fact, I even cited A Walk in the Woods as an example how reality inevitably shatters our pre-hike expectations. By the way, Gudy Gaskill - the acclaimed "Mother of The Colorado Trail" - told me she liked how I didn't gloss over the hardships and pains like other hikers' books and presentations.
I carried one for a long time - cut the handle just enough so it would lay in the bottom of a zip lock. The stock handle on a toothbrush is about 1.5" too long and it annoyed me to have it fit diagonally. Now I carry one of those fold up traveling toothbrushes.
One appealing thing about Bryson's book is it's peppered with history lessons and other interesting facts. Some might say that was just filler to expand word count, but it was interesting never the less.
Wild was not so much about hiking the PCT but how it related to her personal struggle, which was refreshing since she managed to turn her life around without the need for God or Jesus, which seem to be a theme in several other trail books.
Skywalker's books are based on the traditional trail journals format, of which there are many. Which while okay, aren't all that interesting or exciting and aren't about to make a NY times best seller list.
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I eat all of my sandwiches in 16 bites. 4 rows of 4 bites. First 2 rows, left to right. Last 2 rows, right to left. I am certain there a few others that set their shoes in the exact manner every night. I mean really! Who doesn't?
(There. I embarrassed myself in the right thread. Of course, because I am not a thru, I may have wasted that effort. I doubt it though.)
In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. - Abraham Lincoln
Rubin's book is one of the best, among those I've read. Jan Lietschuh did a fine job with her AT journal.
The stories I'm referring to are the forty or fifty journals in that huge Rodale Press anthology, published in 1975, long out of print. Stories from the real trail pioneers. I read that sucker cover to cover in '89 and '90. Ate it all up.
You get indecision in Bryson's story from the get-go. Katz' horrible condition and shaky history. The discussion in the cab with Wes Wesson. All the mishaps that occur on the way to Springer summit. Bryson's take on the notes in the mailbox at Springer, left by prior hikers.
PS, another fun read, "Halfway To Heaven" by Mark Obmascik, about climbing Colorado's 14000-footers. Obmascik clearly going for a Bryson-ish tone and approach, though he does succeed in his goal of climbing all of them.
[QUOTE=rafe;1997726]...The stories I'm referring to are the forty or fifty journals in that huge Rodale Press anthology, published in 1975, long out of print. Stories from the real trail pioneers. I read that sucker cover to cover in '89 and '90. Ate it all up...[QUOTE]
I have that Rodale set and I know what you mean. Take Ed Garvey - love the guy. He did everything for the AT - hike, maintain, serve on the ATC board, lobby Congress and the Forest Service, public outreach. And his book was like a Bible for me as a novice would-be backpacker in the 1970s. Not only did it narrate his hike, he also talked gear, food, clothes, trail history, trail conditions. No other book like it existed at the time, hence its value to me and countless others. But his hike narrative was dry and boring. He occupied much of the space with people he met, taking pains to list their names. I found it tedious, my same reaction to reading modern trail journals where 90% of the prose is about hiking buds.
Garvey quit the trail in his last book The New Appalachian Trail after he flip flopped and was coming south in Maine. He fell and gashed his head. I believe that he was 75 years old at the time. He filled the rest of the book with hiker advice. I was disappointed that he quit but I still enjoyed the book.
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