About the book:
Using the true story of a young man, who in 1992 walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later, Krakauer explores the obsession which leads some people to explore the outer limits of self, leave civilization behind and seek enlightenment through solitude and contact with nature.

This book is going to go on a bookray!

Some brief "rules"
* Journal the book when you receive it.
* PM the next person on the list for their address when you receive it so as to try to avoid hold-ups later on.
* If you don't hear from the next participant within a few days, PM them again. If after a few more days you still haven't heard from them, PM me to let me know, and move on to the next person on the list.
* Read (and hopefully enjoy!) Don't feel pressurised to read it in a rush (and life gets in the way sometimes!) but if you need to keep hold of the book for longer than say a couple of months, please journal to let us know.
* Journal again when you've read it to let us know what you think of it.
* The person at the end of the ray gets to decide what to do with the book.

Participants:

1) GlitterLover (UK)
2) PeaMartian (UK
3) candy-is-dandy (UK))
4) dirtmother (UK)
5) k2005 (UK)<-------------------here!
6) franaloe (EUR)
7) Aberpeter (USA)
8) acountkel (USA)
9) scrutiny (HONG KONG)
10) Ksenia (EUR)

RELEASE NOTES:

Sent to Glitterlover - enjoy!

Received safe and sound. Thanks.

What a gripping and compulsive read. I don't buy books like this and so am really pleased I have had the opportunity through BXing. I really appreciated the fact that the author was empathetic to Chris McCandless. His writing was excellent and really conjured u0p pictures in my mind of the travesl and experiences. I am so impressed.
Off to Peamartian Wednesday 9th Jan - sorry for delay.

Recieved from Glitterlover with thanks (for the book and the extras)!

I have a few other rings to read before I'll get to this one, so it may be a little while before I make another JE. However, I'm off the west coast USA in a couple of months and definitely want to read this before I go...

A very interesting book. I do like to read travel/adventure stories, and like to find out about different places and people. This book certainly introduced me to those things, and as GlitterLover says, I too am pleased that the author is sympathetic to Chris McCandless. I also enjoyed reading about the author's own experiences. Having said this I did find it quite difficult to be sympathetic to Chris McCandless myself, because he has such a different approach to exploring the world from me. I love to visit new (and fairly remote) places myself, but I wouldn't dream of setting off without a map, or having spent a long time planning what I would like to see, and how I would get there (as well as learning how to look after myself while I was there). All that preparation stuff is a big part of the fun for me, and a separate source of pleasure to actually being out their in the wilds.

In summary, a good book, whih introduced me to ways of life that had never occurred to me as feasible, or desirable, before. Thanks for sharing!

I'll put this in the post to candy-is-dandy in the next few days...

It's arrives safely. Thank you.

Sorry for the delay with this book - it somehow managed to file itself in TBR rather than rings, but I am reading it now and will PM dirtmother for her address.

I'm going through a phase of reading extreme travel books though I can't imagine ever wanting to have the same expereiences and specially not this one where death was the final result.

I had mixed feelings about this book, finding it mostly very interesting and absorbing. However, I did feel that the author had really worked hard in producing a whole book out of this story and that it was unnecessarily detailed in some respects. Another obsessive perhaps.

This is now off to dirtmother as I have her address.

Arrived safely from candy-is-dandy this morning. I anticipate being able to read this within the next few weeks

I read this unexpectedly quickly, finding myself and it upstairs and my current book downstairs...

I thought this was an interesting and worthwhile read but I can see what candy-is-dandy is getting at when she refers to it being an expanded magazine article. The whole book is written in what I perceive as a very American style which seems slightly clunky and formulaic, taught in creative class or something - but in this book it is subtle and detracts very little.

Krakauer seems to have been the right person to author this book. It seemed to be entirely appropriate to share his own experiences and his later reflections on them, and I feel that the point that had McCandless survived it is likely that some of the views expressed about his story would not have been, or been considerably muted. The inclusion of other stories of young men going into the wilderness was also valuable - both for the common strands and also because each story was different. It is not possible to write these people off as stereotypes.

I don't think I would have much liked Chris McCandless. Even reading the book I found his intensity oppressive, even making allowances for his youth (well he wasn't *that* young, chronologically out of teenage years) and there were hints of a manipulative side to his nature. But then underlining in books always upsets me! The whole question of where does normality cross the border into pathology, when does difference become disorder, what is genius and what is lunacy is always an interesting and challenging one to explore.

So I felt there were some things missing from the book which could usefully have been there - there was little informed discussion of states of mind - it is stated that some of the other young men were mentally ill but that Chris McCandless wasn't, but it was an unargued case. I missed references to bipolar disorder, to the autistic spectrum, to testosterone. In focussing on the wild, Krakauer has I think just one sentence referring to more common 'reckless' behaviours in young men such as drinking too much and driving too fast. It sometimes felt as though somehow reading the right books, ascribing lofty aspirations to oneself and setting one's rites of passage in nature rather than the urban environment is seen as making a complete distinction between the wanderers and the joy riders which may in practice amount to no more than relative privilege.

There were interesting links to be drawn for me between this and a couple of other books I've read this year: The Silence at the Songs End by Nicholas Heiney, a posthumous publication by the son of a well-known media couple who killed himself in his twenties after a long quiet struggle with mental health difficulties, but who in life pushed himself physically in sailing tall ships and wrote and read poetry, and Stuart, A Life Backwards about a young man in very different socio-economic circumstances who also came to a tragic end.

As a mother of two boys this was scary stuff!

The book did not have me rushing to see these wild places for myself but I enjoyed looking at the pictures it painted for me.

Thank you very much geetheflea for organising this ray.

Somehow this book has done a Chris McCandless of its own and disappeared.

So I have ordered a new copy to be sent direct to k2005 to continue the bookray.

Very sorry!

i received the replacement copy today and will start reading it in a couple of days, thanks dirtmother.

On the bookcrossing shelf behind the counter.