A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

After finishing Into Thin Air, I needed to read something a little less harrowing. Sure, nature can be scary, but there have to be a few great pursuits that anyone with a little free time and a backpack can do, right? I picked up A Walk in the Woods because the premise sounded interesting and because Bill Bryson is a pretty amusing dude. I wasn't disappointed.

A Walk in the Woods follows Bryson and his friend Katz, an overweight, outgoing loudmouth, on their attempt to walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. The A.T. is a huge undertaking, 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine, requiring 6-8 months, lots of food, and some good boots. Bryson and Katz start out as complete amateurs and end feeling like grizzled mountain men.

Although the trail itself was very interesting, some of the anecdotes not directly related were most interesting to me. For example, there's a town somewhere in the States (I can't remember which state and don't have the book handy) where, 80 years ago, a coalfire began underground. The heat caused the ground to begin cracking and collapsing, eventually turning Coalville into a vertual ghost town. The fire is still burning beneath it, and a few hearty souls still live there.

I don't really know what to say about this book. I enjoyed it and it had something of a surprise ending (SPOILER: They quit before the end of the trail), but mostly what I got out of it was an appreciation for nature and for the scale of the United States. Unlike Into Thin Air which probably put me off mountain climbing forever, A Walk in the Woods made me want to take a hike myself. Anyone want to be Katz?

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

In The Assistant, a hard-working and selfless but unsuccessful grocer named Morris Bober is held up by a pair of masked "holdupniks" late one night in his store who beat him and take all of the money in the cash register. One of these men is Frank Alpine, a young Italian who only joins the hold-up reluctantly and later returns to become an assistant to Bober, without confessing his part in the crime, in order to make up to himself for some of his transgressions. Frank is continually caught between his respect for Bober and his desire to pocket more money from the grocery, and eventually falls in love with Bober's daughter, Helen.

The first thing I thought about this book is that it would make a good indie film. It's subdued, but not so philosophically complicated that it would lose much in the filming, and the characters operate on the slightly superficial but often heartbreaking model of so many indie film characters. My second thought was about Jews--Malamud was one of the century's first and foremost Jewish authors, and his depiction of Bober, a kind and dignified but long-suffering man, seems to be the model for many modern Western depictions of Jewish people. At the end of the book (SPOILER), Frank becomes a Jew, but only after learning the value of suffering, hard work, and selflessness. Isn't it interesting, I think, how Western stereotypes about Jews have developed through Jewish literature and art from the money-hungry, sub-human depictions that characterize much of non-Western depictions of Jews? It fascinates me to think about how Americans understand the concept of Jewishness, and how different it must be from a century ago.

But anyway, this book was kind of boring. It was a lot like the Philip Roth book I read, but without the nasty sex. And what book is complete without nasty sex?