Review to follow ( )

This book is a good but certainly not excellent read. It will appeal to those who have an interest in the Appalachian Trail, hiking, or outdoor adventures.

I appreciated how the author interspersed anecdotes and historical background as regards various areas connected to the trail. Occasionally I appreciated his humor -regarding the complexities involved in purchasing necessary equipment, the interactions between the author and his buddy and/or other hikers on the trail, local townspeople along way, etc.

However, I thought the book was simplistic and the humor often fell flat. Nor is there much profound or any significant takeaways. Finally, the book could have been more concise. ( )

Good, funny.

Witty travelogue of a hike along the Appalachian Trail. Chock full of history, amusing anecdotes, trivia, and more. ( )

This is another that didn't hold up to expectations, and perhaps because I just read Scott Jurek's excellent two books. After those, this felt like a considerable flop, and I had a lot of cringe moments.

It was also just boring in places--I think it's noble to try and get a lot of the AT's history in and to talk about all the destruction and change, but it wasn't really well done. It felt kind of like it was thrown in there to fluff the story up and the details weren't told in a particularly interesting fashion, so though I wanted to know them, I got bored with reading them.

This just completely fell into my thoughts on a lot of "big journey" books--it lacked momentum and it lacked any propulsive details. He skips more of the AT than he hikes, and I agree with his argument that he still hiked the AT because hike your own hike, man, but I'm just not sure why his story was one interesting enough to write a book about, because quite frankly, it wasn't.

Maybe this one would be more enjoyable to casual hikers. Or people who didn't just read Jurek. ( )