Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I wish I'd abandoned this one. Honestly, I just don't get what all the hype is about with Cheryl Strayed. Maybe I disliked this because I read Torch first - and I wish I'd abandoned that one as well (I only finished it to see if Bruce would follow through).

Positive point: it's very admirable that she writes so truthfully and seemingly without regrets. I can see this as a reason for people to like her writing so much.

The reasons I didn't like this book: reading some sections felt like I was re-reading Torch, only it was worse since Torch is supposed to be a novel and this was a memoir. And I couldn't believe she actually survived the trail, given her naive and lackadaisical attitude towards a long-haul hike and all the accompanying danger of doing it on your own. As a hiker and a once wilderness ranger, some of her descriptions made me cringe. Overall, it was like watching a train wreck and being surprised that there were hardly any casualties . Granted, some of her attitude changed over the course of the hike, but I came away from the book feeling like she missed her own point of hiking the PCT.

And finally, I do wonder if I ran into her out there - I was working as a wilderness ranger then and the PCT was part of my patrol...at least I didn't have to go out looking for her!

Why is it that a book about how hard it is to backpack, about the misery and the pain and the fear, makes me so desperately want to do it? Maybe because there are parts like this:

“Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off.” (p. 267)

In other words, she tells me my own life.

And she talks about backpacking, which seems to be extreme hiking and camping, which I actually love to do.

Strayed's ego manages to outsize even the magnificent Pacific Crest Trail. She's a self-absorbed asshole who manages to use her mom's death as an excuse to spread her selfishness over everyone she knows. She survives her partial hike of the PCT only due to the amazing generosity of fellow hikers who are actually competent.

Are you wondering if she's pretty? Oh my, yes! Never mind that on the back flap she looks like someone's daffy aunt. Strayed never tires of relating the unending river of compliments she receives about her beauty and sexiness. Her appearance is a constant concern, even when she's on the verge of reaching her goal.

Maybe it shouldn't bother me so much that at one point she mentions snorting tar heroin, a task that is impossible due to tar heroin's, well, tarriness. It comes up when she tells of her brief trist with the drug while shacked up with a fellow florid-tongued dipshit in Portland, Oregon – another situation from which she ends up requiring rescue, this time by her generous ex-husband. That obvious lie makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of her tale (except her stunning beauty, of course).

She appears to think she's somehow developed spiritually or emotionally by the book's close, but it's unclear how. She seems like just as much of a thoughtless ass as she did on page one.

She writes eloquently and there must some truth throughout, for why would someone fabricate a story that makes herself look like such a dick?

While I did give this book 2 stars for hooking me right into the story, after the first third of the book, I found myself rolling my eyes at some of the overwritten, hit-you-over-the-head “profound” connections she makes to events in her past history.

The last third of the book read like she was trying to make the book longer by adding a bunch of hazy off-trail experiences to match the time it took her to hike the last leg of the trail. It felt like I was reading a reality TV show, planned out to astound you with the senselessness of a person's thoughts and actions so you could maybe feel like at least you're not THAT bad.

I had higher expectations for the book as a whole, but at least I did find out about the Pacific Crest Trail–a trail system I had no idea about.

Cheryl's physical journey and personal growth on the Pacific Crest Trail was inspiring. I was really proud of how she pushed herself through the many hardships she endured how she pulled herself out of her lows even before she stepped foot on the trail. I loved how this was a story about a real person with flaws and who shared her true self and was raw with honesty.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. They say that books take you on a journey. Well, Cheryl took me on a journey - not only on the Pacific Crest Trail, but through the recent trial of losing her mother and her life that then spiraled out of control.

I appreciated the way Ms. Strayed wrote, giving enough details about the PCT to keep me interested (even looking at maps and reading more about the trail) but not going overboard with descriptions of the flora and fauna. She also did a good job of weaving the story of her mom and personal life through her walk on the trail and the people she met along the way.

**note: I read the e-book version that included Oprah Winfrey's comments throughout the book. Although I'm an Oprah fan and I enjoyed her comments, there really weren't that many and in the end, I don't really think it was worth it.

Going unprepared into the wilderness can surely add up to a whole lot of writing material. She comes across as Alexander Supertramp but without the depth.

Looked at reviews to try and understand why this is so highly rated to find them neatly divided between people with whom Cheryl resonates & those she irritates.

I am very irritated.

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.”

I very much enjoyed listening to this memoir. The writing is wonderful: honest, evocative and immersive.

The beginning is incredibly dark! The middle is strangely, considering this is a not-fiction story, a nice mix of beauty, personal challenges, interesting individuals, risk, insight, and reward which normally describes a fiction plot. Thankfully there is an end although it felt like only 2 sentences long compared to the rest of the story.

She doesn't go over her decompression into the world, which I would have liked to know more of but what she provides is also good closure.

Good use of words to describe her inner and outer world.

My partner hiked a portion of the PCT similar in length to what Strayed tackled, and I've heard lots of stories about his experience, so reading this had an oddly familiar feel to it. I'm honestly not sure what else to say about it, which is perhaps why I'm stuck at three stars and not four. I'm glad she had the experience, glad she wrote about it, and actually also glad that the movie about it was made (more movies with female protagonists, Hollywood - MORE!!), but the most moving things I think Cheryl Strayed has written include stuff like this: http://therumpus.net/2011/04/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-71-the-ghost-ship-that-didnt-carry-us/

Written by Cheryl Strayed, Wild is a memoir focused on Strayed's navigation of her grief and the mountain wildernesses of the western US. After the death of her mother, Strayed decides to hike the PCT with little planning to "fill the hole in [her] heart."

I've always been curious of hiking (especially backpacking) as my dad loved to tell me stories about the time he spent hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. I haven't gotten to experience much hiking because I live in Texas, so I was quite excited when I came across this book.

One fault of the book is how similar many of the scenes are. Repetition is an important element of writing, but Strayed overuses it, using more or less the same turns of phrase to describe her emotions. I would have liked to see more of her struggles with grief on the trail itself, not just her grief before she went on her hike. Presumably, she also went through negative emotions on the trail along with the positive + the expected exhaustion.

Frankly, it's amazing Strayed safely navigated the trail alone. She hitchhiked with complete strangers on many occasions, encountered rattlesnakes, carried too little water and a too heavy bag, and walked for a few days with duct-taped sandals as shoes. I can imagine there was a little embellishment involved, but it's still an absolute feat. This comment is separate from my writing judgements.

Wild is an entertaining book for those who love memoirs of nature and grief. I was absorbed by Strayed's story, though some of her arrogance pulled me out of it.

I enjoyed this memoir of a young woman dealing with grief over her mother's death and the disintegration of her family, who decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail through California to Oregon. The book is presented as a tale of how Cheryl Strayed worked out her self destructive behavior on the trail (“From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail”), but the story doesn't really record the process of becoming “found” so much as present it as a result of doing the hike. The story of the hike is told along with the story of the mother's death, the falling away of her stepfather and siblings, and her drug use and infidelities to her husband. It's clear that she saw the hike as a kind of salvation even before she started it. But once the story reaches the actual hike, it doesn't dwell on salvation or redemption, but on the details of her life on the trail— which are pretty interesting. You as a reader are free to come to your own conclusions about why or whether the hike was redemptive, but in the meantime you get to enjoy a pretty good adventure story.

I heard so many glowing reviews about this book that I picked it up without knowing much about the story and ... yikes. I honestly could not get through this book. Cheryl's story from page one just oozed self-destruction. Yes, she experienced some serious difficulties and it sounds like she didn't have a great support system around her. However, she blames all of her problems on others and misplaces the blame on the people she drove away with her behavior. It truly breaks my heart that she has such a self-hate for her body and her life. For a self-proclaimed feminist, she uses her body as if it's a tool rather than her own flesh. I skipped to the end of the book to see how it ends and sadly although she learned lessons about perseverance, it sounds like she still has a lot of work to do on her heart before she can ever be happy on her own. She writes the story years later and glorifies all the horribly depressing bits as if they were fond memories. It sounds like someone who has not accepted their past and really refused to learn from her destructive ways. If this were a close friend I would have interrupted her story, pray for her and hope that she finds a good therapist to work through the amount of emotional baggage she clearly shoved into her backpack and never took off.