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Amazon.com Review: Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer

OTHERS' OPINIONS ON WHETHER TO READ OR NOT TO READ I Amazon.com Review "God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild shows that McCandless, wh
Recent posts

Change Is Good-ish

Gah... (I) I went and spent an entire afternoon changing (ahem, figuring out how to change) this page. As you can see. Hopefully. That's all. xx Tracy WHAT I'M READING AT THE MOMENT: Grr... erm. - Snap Happy  by Fiona Walker Was a bust. - Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Haven't started it yet - but planning on it. - Into the Wild by Krakauer It's happening... slowly. Will post a short review from  amazon.com in a minute. - Pip by Freya North About to read it... NOW. P.S. I'm open to book suggestions.

The Only Way is Up - Carole Matthews

TO READ OR NOT TO READ III A record-breaker, if I do say so myself. I finished this one in three days (and only because, you know, I attempted to have a life in between). And yes, I did actually finish it - without trouble... sort of. The Only Way is Up was simply a stunning chick-lit novel that I literally gobbled up in days. Boy did I gobble. Carole Matthews is one of few authors nowadays that I really wish would crank out books faster than I can read them simply for the satisfaction of knowing that I can't keep up with my - dare I say - slight obsession with the wiles of a good romantic comedy. But, then again, I might actually hate them. There's always something in a book that irritates. Or someone. See, The Only Way is Up was supposed to be a cute little "love-survives-anything" story for me, especially with full indication from the start that that's exactly what it would be. Lily Lamont-Jones' husband, the irritatingly likable Laurence, managed to t

Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston

TO READ OR NOT TO READ II Okay. I'm not going to lie. I did watch the movie before I read the book. But in all fairness, it wasn't my fault. The movie was so irritatingly persistent in the back of my mind that I just NEEDED something more than a stupid rescue. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Between a Rock and a Hard Place has a "based-on-the-book-by" movie, "127 Hours". I'm sure you've at least heard about it, but if you haven't it's that James Franco movie where he looks high for other reasons than being high. But, anyway. Onto the book. It was another one I couldn't put down, yet couldn't (or really didn't want to) finish. Aron Ralston really reached and grabbed and pinched (like his dang NERVE) the heartstrings with his autobiographical debut about his experience of being trapped in Blue John Canyon, Canyonland, Ohio. Aron is a mountaineer and hiker extraordinaire. A once successful mechanical engineer

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

TO READ OR NOT TO READ I If only I hadn't taken so long to finish   Pet Sematary , I would be able to go into great detail the excitement I felt about the novel. I've never wanted to finish a novel as badly as I wanted to finish this Stephen King phenomena, but not for any other reason than it was sickeningly difficult to put down when I did get around to reading it. SO, in the end I didn't finish it. I mean, I read the end, but I was too anxious that I somehow, through my minds' own free-will I guess, skipped a few pages in the final chapter and epilogue and went straight to the end. Here's why: I was extremely sceptical about reading an older Stephen King as I had barely scratched the surface of SK's writing with a few of his short stories from Skeleton Crew . For an SK virgin, it was a daunting task of attempting to get through an entire novel, even a shorter one, so I ended up putting it off for weeks. When I finally plucked up the courage to start an a