Author: katenepveu

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Crusie, Jennifer: Fast Women

Yay, mini-vacations. We didn’t have class after Tuesday last week, and no assignments either, so I used the break to catch up, both on the work that I fell behind on because of this whole getting-married thing [1], and on my sleep and leisure time. (The sleep was actually a problem: it seemed that once my body got into AC and realized it could sleep, it decided it ought to sleep—all the time.) Jennifer Crusie’s latest paperback, Fast Women, was perfect mini-vacation reading: funny and quick and engaging and non-stupid.

In my very first post to this book log, I talked about how genre romance novelists tended to move to mainstream by throwing in gratuitous dead bodies and ghosts and whatnot. Crusie is an exception. Her earlier novels were often rather plot-full, particularly with mysteries; she’s mostly added characters to make her mainstream novels longer. She also manages to keep the plot of Fast Women towards the forefront throughout the book, making it feel less lumpy than many similiar efforts. However, the plot, mysterious goings-on in a detective agency, does feel a bit forced in its connections to the book’s story, marriage—which the book is none too subtle about. The relationship of the main characters is also resolved a bit quickly for my taste.

Reading this over, it sounds a bit perfunctory, for which I apologize. I enjoyed this a lot, and it engaged me enough that I spent time thinking about it instead of tossing it aside; but I’m already back in the grind, and I don’t have time to do a more thorough job of it.

[1] A few pictures are now up, in case anyone cares.

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Gaiman, Neil: Coraline (audio)

Another audio book, this one Coraline, written and read by Neil Gaiman. On Wednesday, during our escape to air conditioning, we stopped in at our Local Independent Bookstore (hey, we were in the plaza anyway to do a couple of errands). They didn’t have the book of this yet, but did have it on cassette; since we’d heard Gaiman read the first few chapters at Boskone and knew he was a good reader, and since we had a couple of hours’ driving to get to the air conditioning, we said why not.

Coraline and her family have just moved, into a big old English house that is divided into flats. There is a crazy old man living in the top flat, who says he is training a mouse circus (hence the URL of the official site; it’s Flash, according to Gaiman’s journal (which appears to not do permalinks, annoyingly), so I haven’t bothered going there). There are two old women on the bottom floor, who drink tea and read the leaves and walk their Highland terriers and talk about when they trod the boards. And in Coraline’s flat, there is a locked door that opens onto a brick wall—except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it opens into a dark passage that smells of something very old and very slow. The passage leads to a flat very like Coraline’s, where her other mother and other father live. They look and sound like her parents, and love Coraline very much, and want her to stay forever . . . but their skin is paper-white, and their eyes are shiny black buttons.

I enjoyed this very much, though I can’t say whether I enjoyed it more for hearing it first. There are few definite pluses to hearing it first. For instance, I picture the button eyes (a positively brilliant bit of creepy imagery) differently than Dave McKean illustrates them (yes, we bought the book too, later), bigger and sewn cross-wise, not parallel. Some of the characters call the other mother the “beldam,” which I heard as “belle dame,” as in “sans merci”; since I usually don’t pronounce things in my head as I read, I probably would have mis-read or misunderstood. More generally, Gaiman does the voices really well (and it’s a treat to hear his soft English-corrupted-by-America accent says things like “weird”), and the rat songs by the Gothic Archies (Stephin Merritt’s band), are terrific, though I don’t care for the theme song.

Audio books are, by their nature, a slower way to experience a novel, which can both heighten and deflate suspense. I commented about this in relation to The Reptile Room; though Coraline has more plot than The Reptile Room, I still found myself trying to tell Coraline “Don’t you remember this,” or “Didn’t you notice that,” or “What about this other thing?” It’s not that she’s an annoyingly stupid protagonist—she’s really quite sharp—but that’s the format again. (There was another point where something bad happened and then I had to turn over the tape, during which time I figured out, “Oh, of course, X will happen and take care of it.” And it did. Had I been reading, I would have gasped, barrelled on, and been surprised by X. The only point of which is that in an ideal world, audio books would be arranged so that they broke at chapters.)

On the other hand, I think I was considerably more creeped out by hearing this than by reading it, again because of the slower format. When I’m hearing something, I put a lot more effort into visualizing it than when I’m reading, and there are some lovely creepy bits here to visualize. I believe, at one point Wednesday night, I insisted that black rats with little red eyes were staring at me when I shut my eyes. In my defense, I must say that by the time we arrived at the air conditioning I was extremely car sick, and consequently fell face-first into bed and went to sleep almost immediately. Chad woke me up to change for bed, and thus when I said that, I was still quite sick and about 85% asleep. (But they were, all the same.) There’s a dash of something Stephen King-flavored (short stories, not novels) to Coraline; perhaps it’s something about the tunnel, and the mist, and the cocoons. It is, undoubtedly, a strange little book.

It is also a fairy tale, and accordingly runs on some of the logic and conventions of fairy tales. For instance, Coraline is given clues and tools along the way, and the how and why of those clues and tools isn’t important next to how she uses them to prevail. (I mention this because I found myself wanting to know more than we’re told, and had to remind myself what genre we were in.) There are also a couple of set-piece conversations which I heard as Gaiman attempting to subvert certain children’s stories/fairy tale conventions, which don’t work as successfully; again, perhaps it’s because I was hearing it, but I found them slightly awkward and obvious. (Terry Pratchett can pull stuff like that off in his Discworld books, but when he hits A Message, it’s inherent in the story from the start.) It’s a small point and one that doesn’t really affect the rest of the story.

Anyway: good stuff, which I found considerably more satisfying for what it was than Gaiman’s last novel, American Gods. I frankly don’t know whether to recommend the text or the audio book, but either would probably do just fine. (If you get the book, though, check that you got the regular edition; Borders was selling a limited edition, which had just a few pages of extra material at the end for something like eight bucks more.)

[Update: per Gaiman’s journal, which still does not do permalinks [entry for July 8], the more expensive edition was “produced for comics stores as a ‘retail incentive,'” and why Borders is selling it is a mystery. So, Stupid Bookstore Tricks, not Stupid Publisher Tricks.]

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Eager, Edward: (02) Magic by the Lake

I stopped by the local used bookstore yesterday and picked up a fairly odd assortment of things: Edward Eager’s Magic by the Lake, Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women, and a second edition Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. A children’s book, a novel that (judging by past Crusie books) will include either literal or figurative headbanging sex, and a dusty reference work. I was almost disappointed that the store’s owner didn’t say anything when he rang them up . . .

Magic by the Lake is the sequel to Half Magic, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. I have no idea why I’d never read this, but I rediscovered Half Magic a few years ago and have been vaguely meaning to read more of Eager’s other books since. I read Magic by the Lake last night, justifying it to myself as a reward for doing reasonably well on the first of the simulated exam sections in the bar review course; really, though, I was just too hot and tired to do anything useful by the time we got home from dinner and errands.

Like Half Magic, ’tis a silly book. Four children are vacationing at a lakeside cottage for the summer; one of them sees a sign by the cottage that says “Magic by the Lake,” and another wishes it were true—unfortunately, in the hearing of a turtle, who grants the wish rather grumpily (apparently all turtles are magic).

“You had to be greedy and order magic by the lake, and of course now you’ve got a whole lakeful of it, and as for how you’re going to manage it, I for one wash my hands of the whole question!” . . .

The four children stared, transfixed.

Every bit of the lake’s surface seemed to be suddenly alive, and each bit of it was alive in a different way. It was like trying to keep track of a dozen three-ring circuses, only more so.

Water babies gamboled in the shallows. A sea serpent rose from the depths. Some rather insipid-looking fairies flew over. A witch hobbled on a far bank. A rat and a mole and a toad paddled along near the willowly shore, simply messing about in a boat. A family of dolls explored a floating island. On the other side of the same island, a solitary man stared at a footprint in the sand. A hand appeared in the middle of the lake holding a sword. Britannia ruled the waves. Davy Jones came out of his locker. Neptune himself appeared, with naiads and Nereids too numerous to mention.

The two younger children shut their eyes.

“Make it stop,” said Martha. . . .

“And you needn’t go asking me to take it back, because it’s too late. Magic has rules, you know, the same as everything else.”

“Yes, we know,” said Mark, “but you’d never think so, to look at it now. It’s all every which way.”

They all looked at the lake again. Some Jumblies had appeared, going to sea in a sieve. A walrus and a carpenter danced with some oysters on a nearby shore. In the distance Columbus was discovering America.

There is something ineffably English about these. For instance:

“We could take our lunch,” said Katharine.

“What kind of sandwiches?” said Mark.

“Jam,” said Martha thoughtfully, “and peanut-butter-and-banana, and cream-cheese-and-honey, and date-and-nut, and prune-and-marshmallow . . . “

A time passed.

Their mother came into the kitchen. “What’s all this mess?” she said. “Nobody leaves this house till it’s cleaned up.”

And nobody did.

I read this bit last night as a prime example of “the English have weird ideas about sandwiches,” something I’d learned from experience. Of course, on the back porch, racing to finish before dark fell completely, I managed to miss the line right before that said “Let’s explore our own territory. See America first,” making a later reference to Indiana quite the rude shock.

It’s a bit dated now in its assumptions about gender roles, but not in too objectionable a way. Half Magic is better, but this is light, fun, amusing summer reading.

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Stout, Rex: (14) Trouble in Triplicate

I decided last week that I needed to be reading something that lent itself to small chunks, since during the time I was nominally re-reading Freedom & Necessity, I was really mostly flipping through old Discover magazines, because Freedom & Necessity was too likely to consume time and energy I didn’t have to spare. None of the anthologies we had at the time looked appealing (or they were, you guessed it, in boxes somewhere), so I thought I’d work my way through the Nero Wolfe collections in order because, well, why not?

I’d recently read both the first, Black Orchids, and the second, Not Quite Dead Enough. Both are two story collections; the next, Trouble in Triplicate, sets the pattern for the rest by having three stories and some reference to “three” in the title. (The only exception is And Four to Go.) Later collections sometimes have a theme, which is indicated by their title (for instance, Three Witnesses); this book’s theme is apparently “stories Kate doesn’t like.”

I began reading the first, “Before I Die,” and partway through said, “Oh look—legal stuff!” (In case anyone is curious: I’m almost certain the legal maneuvering at the end wouldn’t have worked then. It would be much easier to achieve that purpose now, but with a different method.) This is the one where Wolfe gets involved with the Mob because he’s craving meat and there’s a shortage. It was on A&E recently, and I passed up watching it because it’s frankly a silly premise.

“Help Wanted, Male” was on A&E last night; someone’s out to kill Wolfe and he hires a decoy. It does have Archie in uniform, being the third World War II story (the other two are in Not Quite Dead Enough), but beyond that I think it has little to recommend it, turning on a deeply absurd plot point. (Chad tells me that I missed seeing Fritz trying to look menacing while holding a gun on people, which I admit could have been worth a look.) I’ve never liked this one and still don’t.

“Instead of Evidence” has a nice subtle, though not very distinctive, title, and that’s about all. I don’t understand the series’ apparent obsession with explosive devices, and the longer I read these, the more annoyed I get at Wolfe’s cavalier attitude towards methods of justice. Also, I refuse to believe Archie could be as stupid as he appears, even for the moment described in the book.

As Wolfe would say: Pfui.

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Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity [re-read]

In my re-read of Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, I’d been stuck about forty pages from the end for a week or two. I knew that I’d want to read the rest all at once, but I didn’t feel able to justify taking even that much time to read fiction. (I have been taking non-study time, just mostly with Chad; among other things, providing minor technical support for his new weblog, Uncertain Principles. Go read it.) Monday, though, I promised it to myself as a reward for cleaning the bathroom, and I assembled most of this post in spare bits of time since.

Freedom and Necessity is another of those books it’s oddly difficult for me to write about. Unlike The Last Hot Time, I know why I like it so much; but I also know that some of those reasons are nearly irrelevant for these purposes (the extent to which I do or do not identify with certain of the characters being of no use at all to those of you who are, well, not me). Other reasons are more objective but hardly universal. If you’ll pardon a slightly silly anecdote as an analogy: I won’t let Chad read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, because I’m virtually certain he wouldn’t like it, and I don’t want him to actively dislike a book that’s important to me. (Not that I could actually stop him from reading it, of course. But he really wouldn’t like it.) Similarly, I hesitate to praise F&N too highly here, in case someone reads it as a result and doesn’t like it (and then complains). So, if I sound strangely subdued for someone talking about one of her favorite books, that’s why.

F&N opens in England, in 1849, with a letter from James Cobham to his cousin Richard:

My Dear Cousin,

I wonder how you will greet these words; indeed, I wonder how you will receive into your hands the paper that bears them, as I think you cannot be in expectation of correspondence from me. . . .

In short, I have been given to understand that I am believed dead by all my family and acquaintance—that I was seen to die, in fact, or at least, was seen to sink beneath the water a last time, and my corpse never recovered, though long and passionately sought for. You may imagine the fascination with which I heard this account, though you will imagine, too, that my fascination is accompanied by horror, which is far from the case. I cannot tell how it is, but though I know the thought of myself as a corpse should by all rights cause me distress, I find it holds only the interest, raises only the feelings, that such a thing might in verse or fiction.

What should distress me yet more, and what may, as my sensibilities recover somewhat from the curious flattened state they are now in, is that, for all I can recall, I may indeed have drowned. I have no knowledge of any act, any word, any thing at all that occurred between the conclusion of that pleasant luncheon on the lake shore, and my discovery—rediscovery—of my wits and person at the bottom of the garden behind this respectable inn at an hour when almost none of the respectable inhabitants of it were conscious. I have read, I suppose, too many fables and fairy-tales, for the first thing I asked of the good landlord, upon gathering my straying thoughts and finding my voice, was the month, day, and year. How relieved I was to find I had not been whisked away for seven times seven years, but for a scant two months! And yet, how and where were those two months passed? For anything I could tell, I might indeed have spent them happily in Fairyland, but for sundry signs about my person that it might not have been an unalloyed happiness. . . .

Finding out what happened to James, and what is going to happen to James, is the core of the rest of the book.

I tend to think of books as having both a plot and a story (ideally, that is). There are probably more technical terms for that, but to me, the plot is what happens in the book, and the story is what the book’s really about. For example, in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory, the plot is that Miles screws up royally, gets fired, and then finds himself playing detective when his old boss is disabled. The story is that Miles grows up (somewhat). I tend to think of story as being mostly character-based, though in some cases it’s mixed with theme; to me, the story in the Sarantine Mosaic is learning (or not) to live in the world of time and change, love and loss, intellect and emotion, and art and history.

Apropos of the Sarantine Mosaic, the plot of Freedom and Necessity is in some regards not far from byzantine. Its form contributes to its apparent complexity; it’s an epistolary novel, and the letters and diary entries are virtually note-perfect as letters and diary entries, which ought not to surprise readers of Brust’s Agyar, a perfectly brilliant novel-as-journal that everyone ought to go out and read, now. But for quite a while its components are being written by people who only know part of what’s going on, or are keeping things from each other, or are talking about things that they expect each other to know about, so they don’t bother to explain them to us. Eventually large chunks of the plot do get revealed, though Brust & Bull usually give the reader a chance to figure it out for themselves, which is nice. However, because of the form, a number of smaller questions stay unanswered, which can be a touch frustrating. (For the longest time, none of the plot would stay in my head; every time I would re-read, I would be wondering again who the man with the ginger moustache is and the like. It appears to have stuck now, but the characters and the prose have always been more important to me.)

Some of the questions that stay unanswered would help resolve the perennial question of whether this is a fantasy novel or not. Some people get very exercised over the whole issue—either they think it’s definitely one thing, and thought they were getting the other, or they want to know which it’s supposed to be. The closest thing to a definite word on the subject is from one of the authors, who said that it depended on which character you asked. I don’t really care; it’s a damn good novel and I’m happy to leave it at that, but if such things matter to you, be warned.

Really, because of the epistolary form, I feel that saying almost anything about the plot would be an unfair spoiler. So I shall talk about the story instead, which is hardly a spoiler because it’s right in the first letter: the book is about the resurrection of James Cobham. Oh, okay, it’s also about means and ends in one’s political and personal life, and there are other characters and other events of importance, but at core it’s about James in the same way that Dunnett’s Lymond books are about, well, Lymond. (Not a comparison generated at random. Can’t you just see Francis Crawford of Lymond, being asked to pick one word to describe himself, coming up with “agile”?) I’ve had James taking up space in my head for nearly a month now, along with a number of his relatives; it hasn’t always been comfortable, but their taking up so much space for so long should indicate how vividly complex the characters are.

I appear to have rambled my way to a close, or at least to a point where the only things I have left to say are spoilers of the worst sort. (I shall post those to Usenet and put the link in a comment, for those who’ve read the book already.) I remember the time I was re-reading this on D.C.’s Metro on the way home from work; my deep absorption was apparently so obvious that the stranger sitting next to me felt moved to comment on it, observing that I was reading very fast and had not looked up once. I muttered something about re-reading and put my head back down; he, undeterred, added something about how it must be really good, huh? I wanted badly to point out that if it was, did he think I would thank him for interrupting me? (I have no idea what I said—or how I looked—but he did get the hint after that.) Even during the miserable days of studying for the bar (please don’t ask me how miserable, or I might tell you, and then neither of us would be happy), Freedom and Necessity can still generate that level of absorption in me.

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Stout, Rex: (08) Where There’s a Will

Yesterday, I took a round-trip train ride to New York City, and one can only do—actually, one can only carry—so much bar review material around the city. [1] For the same reason, I also didn’t want to bring my hardcover Freedom and Necessity. I chose a paperback by staring at the Nero Wolfe shelf until I spotted a novel that I remembered nothing about; this turned out to be Where There’s a Will. Of course, my sleep-fogged brain picked a book with, oh joy, legal bits! Note to self: Rex Stout was not writing fact patterns for a bar review essay . . .

Legal nitpicking aside (of which I could do plenty, so be glad I spared you), this is a reasonably good one, with some nice dramatic and melodramatic bits. However, the definitive piece of evidence does get withheld from the reader in a particularly annoying way, which a later book (or maybe short story; I forget) tries to make up for. The solution is deducible without it, though, and for a change I actually did (though I have read this before, so it’s not a fair test). Anyway, a perfectly good train-and-lunch book.

[1] I now have a job for the fall, which I am happy about, but my anxiety over the final formal interview was not helped by the realization that this would be the first time I was above-ground in New York City since the summer. (I’d transferred from Penn Station to Grand Central and back a few times, but always on tight schedules, so I stayed underground.) I happened to walk up Broadway a few blocks from the site; I didn’t detour, wanting to be neither a ghoul nor an emotional wreck for the rest of the day, but I did look down side-streets. Really, all I can say is that it was Very Strange.

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Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity; [personal] post-wedding post

And now good-morrow to our waking souls . . .  -or- Reader, I married him.

This past Saturday, to be precise.

If you were there—we hope you had a good time. If you weren’t—we wish you could have been. If it had been practical, we would have invited everyone we know and random people off the street to celebrate with us.

And yes, this has actual book log relevance, for two reasons. First, between reveling in wedded bliss (yay) and studying for the bar exam (boo), I have no idea how much time I’ll have to read this summer. (Again, I recommend BlogTracker.) Second, on Saturday, I insisted on an hour alone before getting dressed and leaving for the ceremony. Besides just enjoying the opportunity to sit quietly by myself and think, I also read pieces from Steven Brust and Emma Bull’s Freedom and Necessity. I didn’t get to re-read the whole thing, so I will post an actual entry about it when I finish the re-read—but it’s one of those books that’s important to me, in part for idiosyncratic personal reasons. This is part of a letter from one lover to another, late in the book.

Love, say the young bachelors, the wilder debutantes, the dissatisfied married men and women, is leg-irons; even those who seem happy in the state refer to it as being “bound,” as if love by its nature is a period of confinement. If that, too, is part of love’s proper definition, then I don’t love you. What I feel for you has given me freedom on a scale I have never conceived of—I, who have spent my whole adult life in the cause of liberty.

Do you remember . . . when Engels asked me to agree that my first duty is to my class, and I told him that, having examined some of the options, I would accept that as true? One of the things I weighed against my duty to my class, marvelling at the mingled fear and cold-bloodedness with which I did it, was my duty to you. That was my first inkling of this new freedom. Here was no destructive polarity, no exclusive choice between passion and principles. My duty to you required my duty to my class. To deny the latter would have reduced and blasted the thing I offered to you, and tainted the former with a mean and cowardly spirit. How many seeming clever people are there, who would declare that the overthrow of principle in the name of love is romantic? Am I far off the mark in imagining your Dianic scowl (the one the huntress must have worn when siccing her dogs on a trespasser) at the news that I would entertain for a moment such a choice?

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Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: (07) A Working of Stars

During finals, I also read Debra Doyle and James Macdonald’s A Working of Stars, the sequel to The Stars Asunder. This was good, but not the best in the series. Past books have featured assorted revelations-and-inversions, often related to messing with causality; these have explained oddities or added something to the reader’s knowledge of the universe. However, this book’s time-travel doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose, which makes it sort of odd. There are some good bits here all the same, but it doesn’t hang together as well as prior episodes. I’m also more curious than ever what the next, currently-untitled Mageworlds book would be about; this book wraps up one plot thread, but doesn’t conclude another, and we’re still some five-hundred-odd years from the other books, with no clue how much of that time is going to be covered. Hmmm.

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Stout, Rex: (09) Black Orchids

I am full of contentment and generalized good-will today; it started yesterday with a lovely dinner, and continues because I currently have something like free time for the first time in, oh, weeks. It’s not going to last, but while I have it, I’m going to get this updated, darn it.

Early last week I snagged a copy of Rex Stout’s Black Orchids while in Albany for a job interview. Unlike Chad, I wouldn’t rule out the title story appearing on TV, since Johnny’s part could easily be filled by Orrie. It was interesting to see that in this, the first Wolfe story collection, Stout made an attempt at linking up the stories with some filler text and a forced cross-story reference. I’m glad the device wasn’t used again, as the explicit reference doesn’t really work, though there’s a subtler touch that I thought was amusing. On the first page of “Black Orchids,” Archie explains that of course he was the one stuck with going to the flower show, because “Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out.” In “Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” Archie reports to Wolfe on a visit to the client:

When he’s doing a complete coverage, he thinks nothing of asking such a question as, “Did the animal pour the iodine on the grass with its right paw or its left?” If he were a movable object and went places himself it would save me a lot of breath, but then that’s what I get paid for. Partly.

I’m not all that crazy about “Black Orchids,” but “Cordially Invited . . . ” was fairly entertaining, even if Wolfe does one-and-a-half things wildly out of character. If nothing else, it made me very grateful that tetanus vaccinations are available now; I didn’t realize how easy it could be to get infected.

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Bryson, Bill: Walk in the Woods, A

One of the ways you can tell it’s finals is that, on my night stand, there is a Bill Bryson book, in this case A Walk in the Woods. (Another way is that I get a bit unstrung, as evidenced by my last post.) I can’t afford to read something with a strong narrative flow at bedtime just now, as I’m short enough on sleep as it is, but I need something absorbing enough to stop my poor overheated brain from running around on little tracks squeaking, “Vested interests, measuring lives, and unborn widows, oh my! Too many papers! Too much work! No time!” (Wills, Trusts, and Future Interests exam this morning. A tip for non-lawyers: if you ever hear the phrase “Rule Against Perpetuities,” run away. Fast.)

A Walk in the Woods is perfect for this. It’s nonfiction, and it’s reasonably episodic, but it’s quite funny and very distinctive. I can read a couple of chapters, chuckle, think, “Hey, it could be worse—I could be in the cold, wet, bug- and bear-filled woods with a 40-pound pack on my back,” and then go to sleep. This is probably the best of Bryson’s travel books (I haven’t read his language ones yet), with just the right mix of seriousness, great description, and pure silliness:

[Bryson is in the local bookstore, stocking up on information about the Appalachian Trail.]

On the way out I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it at random, found the sentence “This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him,” and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

This was originally published in the U.K., and that was the version I first read; it’s interesting to see the changes that were made for the American version. Besides changing “boot” to “trunk” and the like, the main thing I notice is the tweaks to the ending, which make it a little less snarky and a touch nicer about Katz (a college acquaintance of Bryson who accompanies him on the trail, despite being even less suited for it than Bryson, which is saying something).

(I’m also curious what kinds of notes Bryson took while on the trail. He never mentions it, so it’s hard to say, but he planned to write a book about it, so he must have been taking some notes. I always wonder this sort of thing when I see full dialogue quoted in reminiscences, is all.)

Anyway, in case there’s someone out there who hasn’t read this yet, I recommend it.

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