Wild - Cheryl Strayed

Another audiobook down.  These are great for listening to while working on spreadsheets, guys!  This one drew me because it was on several recommendation lists; one for adventure-lovers, one for memoirs, and I think it was on a list of recommendations from the cast of something that I watched recently, but I'm not 100% sure on that last one.  The idea of a woman whose life is in shambles going on a twelve hundred mile hike and finding herself along the way appealed to me, and so off I went.

The narrator for this was good, and so is the book structure.  Strayed intersperses the parts about her journey on the trail with more biographical sections about her life before the hike.  Breaking it up like that is a wise decision, so that neither part seems like too much of a slog.  However, I felt like there was more pre-trail biographical material in here than was really needed.  She spent a lot of time re-hashing things that she had already gone over--yes, yes, she loved her mother and was devastated in the wake of her death.  This was a wrenching story the first time around, less the fifth or sixth time.  With all of this going over and over again, it really felt like the book ended up being the story of her pre-trail life interspersed with her trail life--that is, that the pre-trail life was the bulk of the book, and the hiking actually took up less of the book than one would think, given the title and cover of the book and how it begins, with a scene of Strayed losing one of her hiking boots over the edge of a cliff.

And here's something to keep in mind if you're planning on reading this book: Cheryl Strayed, at the time that she embarked on her adventure, was not necessarily a good person.  Her marriage had dissolved after she confessed to sleeping with a ton of people who were not her husband while they were married; she had substance abuse problems, including heroin.  Sometimes she acknowledges that she was not really a good person, nor was she in a good place before the hike; at other times, however, she tries to spin it off with a sort of "Hee hee!  Look how messed up and quirky I was!  Tee hee!" sort of tone, which annoyed me vastly.  Because that's the thing: if you're going to put your whole life out there for everyone to read, everyone gets to judge you for it.

As for the hiking portions of the book, not a lot actually goes on.  It becomes very quickly evident that Strayed was not prepared for the hike, which she freely admits.  There's a lot of suffering, toenails falling off, boots plaguing her, burning the pages of books as she reads them to lighten her pack, dubbed "Monster" for its size.  She sees a bull, bears, and rattlesnakes, but no mountain lions.  But mostly it's pretty much exactly what you can expect: a lot of walking.  The people she meets along the way are enjoyable, but for the most part this was a solitary journey for her, and that shoes.  It was definitely an adventure for her to live, but it perhaps doesn't shine quite as well when you're reading (or hearing) about it, especially years later.  Parts of it did make me want to go off and have a hiking adventure of my own--but other parts made me never want to leave the city again, though in an age of cell phones (and solar chargers) and GPS technology, it would no doubt be a very different experience from the one Strayed lived in 1995.

Overall, an amusing listen, but certainly not what I thought I was getting myself into (much like Strayed herself) and probably not something I would go back to, with the balance issues it has.

3 stars out of 5.