[Book Reviews] 50% unlikable protagonists

[thewronghands]

Entertainingly, both sections here have two fictional books and one nonfiction. Getting the three that I just didn't like out of the way first:

Comments

[miss_adventure]

I am so glad I am not the only one who thought the Into The Wild guy was a the Platonic ideal of a Darwin Award champion. (I liked Cheryl Strayed"s Wild OTOH, despite her lack of knowledge and her own serious albeit understandable issues, because she owned it and made it work and was contrite about the messed-up things she had done.)

[thewronghands]

I haven't read that one, but yeah. I think a lot of whether or not that kind of thing goes over well is whether or not you admit that you screwed up and learn from it. I have certainly made lots of mistakes in the wilderness! Every time you go to a new bioregion you start over, in some ways. New climate challenges, new local wildlife, new weather patterns to learn to watch out for. So if people are like "well, that was another fine learning experience" and fix it, that's the kind of thing that makes for a good story later. And there are certainly people who die in the wilderness where they just got unlucky. It's a risk. We can mitigate it but we can't prevent it. And I even support everyone's right to decide what risks they are going to take with their own life. It just gets rough when it was so hard on his family -- he could have been way kinder to them, and he wasn't. (And his friends, but he was way nicer to his friends than he was to his family. No known reason beyond his sellout pigs rant.) That was the utter

[miss_adventure]

I recommend it for her prose, and her clear-eyed stating of how she fucked up many, many times and was in the process of learning from it all. I'll send you my copy, if you like.

Heroes of the wilderness are people who do something for conservation or help protect wild habitat. This guy didn't seem concerned with much beyond himself.

Yep. And he was even bad at that.

[pseudotheist]

Yeah, I don't think it's a particularly uncommon take. It's kind of difficult to feel for the guy who actively eschews responsibility and preparation. It seems like he found the end he was inevitably seeking, he just had to wait for happenstance to fill in the details.

On the other hand, I was also not thrilled with Wild; I'm already well aware that people undertaking challenges beyond their skill set with inadequate preparation tend to run into difficulties. I didn't feel that anything in it really merited the time I had to devote to reading it. But I'm a very miserly reader; I think I would review it more generously if I were an avid one.

[miss_adventure]

Maybe I've read too many fawning reviews of Into the Wild.

I loved Wild for Cheryl Strayed's prose and narrative structure; I am an avid reader, albeit a time-crunched one, and as far as tales of falling apart and rebuilding go, hers is well-told.