Nothing is sacred, and sometimes that can get annoying (hold on, I’ll get there), but the self-depreciation is if not always laugh-out-loud funny, a good chuckle. What makes the narrative even more relatable is its easy, conversational cadence and Bryson’s sarcasm. Neither of them are serious in the annoying way of all mad hobbyists, and for this even non-athletic couch-potato readers (yours truly) can get involved with the adventure and, Lord help me, even start to think about hiking or exploring a little. We enjoy living through Bryson and his seemingly random sidekick. Yet the sense of adventure and the desire to mow over those comfort zones is intriguing and readers get into the escapade. What ensues is a semi-educational, semi-slapstick, semi-sarcastic rendition of a half-assed attempt at hiking through the great wilderness with a sardonic narrator and his unfit pal, the tag-along Katz.Ī Walk in the Woods has a weird, seemingly sleepy premise. He’s never hiked before and although all his research has lead him to piles of books about bear attacks and all the different ways you can die in the woods, he’s already announced the idea, and there’s no going back now. In the mood for resolutions, he decides to hike the Appalachian Train which stretches from Georgia to Maine, covering hundreds of miles of untouched (or, at least, mostly untouched) American landscape. Bryson, a general eccentric odd-ball of the authorish type begins the book slightly overweight and out-of-shape.

I was, after all, going to find this book dull, but at least the kitschy cover promised a bear story somewhere in the midst of all that health/outdoorsy stuff. I decided to stick to the title I had most heard/seen even though my interest in hiking doesn’t extend beyond the occasional trot around the block to help-out my Pokemon-Go index. However, I didn’t know he was still, as they say, “a thing.” After the onslaught of excited readers to Frederick and all the consequential full auditoriums and traffic jams, it became pretty obvious that Bryson is hardly a spent force or a forgotten bestseller of the early 2000s.Ī Walk in the Woods was our suggested book club pick, with the caveat that reading anything by Bryson would also be acceptable. I knew Bryson had been a big-name author of general non-fiction ranging from every topic under the sun – camping to the dynamics of the English language. I recalled hearing of Bryson and seeing this particular book cover way back in the mists of time when I was first in college. With Bill Bryson hitting up some local colleges in Frederick, my book club decided to shift the schedule and include a Bryson book read-athon in preparation for his speech.

A walk through the woods bill bryson