A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

"The longest continuous footpath in the world, the Appalachian Trail stretches along the East Coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine, through some of the most arresting and celebrated landscapes in America.

At the age of forty-four, in the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike through the vast tangled woods which have been frightening sensible people for three hundred years. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack.

Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors."

Before ‘An Idiot Abroad’ ever cemented a vision of English travelling that revolved around an uncomprehending blankness about the achievements and successes of other nations, or a distaste for travelling to places of wonder and awe, Bryson was ALSO moodily assessing the state of the world. Far from the current, tiresomely modern exercise in banality that marks out the works of the ‘Is it just me or is everything shit? Brigade’, Bryson deconstructs the places and people around him, drawing meaning and insight from small towns, the food and the arch-locations he journeys through.

His strength as a travel writer is often the incidental way he writes about travel; part historian and part comedian, his musings frequently resemble nothing less than streams of information – facts, figures and analysis are consumed and reassembled in pithy summations, that impart far more than any travelogue or journey plan alone ever could. Bryson at times resembles nothing less than a polymath; the range of research that went into a book such as A Walk in the Woods is intense, but his down-to-earth writing style, aversion to floridity and general good humour often convinces that these are not just post-journey findings, but simply off the cuff recitals of things he knows.

Bryson is my favourite travel companion, and A Walk in the Woods is more than just my favourite book about travelling. Its evocation of a way of life divorced from the wider world, of men and women who mark time by the miles they’ve walked, and who are consumed by their passion, as well as for the world outside and how much we’ve lost of our place in nature is powerful and compelling. Like all the great writers, filmmakers and artists whose work is touched by a love of ‘The Green’ (to borrow an idea from Swamp Thing) reading his books makes you want to scale a mountain, or explore a forest, to lie in the grasp and allow time to pass by.

Also Try:

Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island

Tony Hawks, Round Ireland with a Fridge

Dave Gorman, Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure!

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower