Bookworm

The introduction...

Hello, readers.

I am making this first blog an introduction of myself and my plans for this blog. I spent a great deal of time trying to decide what sort of theme my blog should have. Most blogs seem to be written by experts on certain topics- there are fitness blogs by personal trainers, family blogs by mothers, and entertainment blogs by people who seem to know everything about the innerworkings of the industry. I'm only a student, I told myself. What in the world could I possibly be an expert on? But I was asked to write a blog because I'm a student, and that gives me a unique perspective. So I finally decided that I should probably blog about something I love, and that something happens to be books.

I just finished reading a book called "The Polysyllabic Spree" by Nick Hornby, right before I was asked to write this blog. The book is basically a compilation of articles from a column Hornby wrote for the literary magazine The Believer. I have to mention it here because it was basically my inspiration for this blog. The idea of the column was for Hornby to, each month, list every book he bought and every book he read, and then for him to give a review of each book he read along with some thoughts on the side about life or just explanations for why he bought five books on a certain topic or read five books by a particular author in the same month.

I really enjoyed the book and when I was asked to do this column, I knew I wanted to write something like that. Since my blog is going to be weekly for the most part, I won't have quite the long list of books he had in his column each month, but I will probably pick one or two books each week and talk about them. I might occasionally want to also branch out and include a movie review, especially for movies based on books, like the upcoming movie The Kite Runner, which I am very excited to see.

This weekend my boyfriend and I made the long drive to State College to see the movie Into the Wild, which is based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. For those who have not heard of the book, it is an expansion on an essay Krakauer wrote in 1993 for Outside magazine called "Death of an Innocent," about the adventures and then the tragic death of Christopher McCandless. McCandless, after graduating from college, gave all his money to charity and then hitchhiked west, working a few odd jobs but mostly living off the land. Eventually McCandless made it to Alaska, which had been his goal from the beginning. He survived in the Alaskan wilderness for 112 days, and spent his time hunting, reading, writing in his journal and finding edible plants. When McCandless finally decided he was ready to go home, he found he was unable to cross over the creek he had crossed originally because it had risen too high. A short time after he got back to the abandoned bus he was living in, he became extremely weak. It is assumed that he ate the poisonous seeds of a wild potato. The potato caused him to slowly starve to death, and when his body was found he only weighed 67 pounds. Krakauer's book is an attempt to figure out why an intelligent and kind young man with a bright future and all the material comforts he could ask for would decide to give up everything he had to live in the wild. It is a heartbreaking tale, because you already know how it ends. More info on the book can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Into-Wild-Jon-Krakauer/dp/0385486804

The movie took a slightly different approach, and while I enjoyed it immensely it seems that the film is never as good as the book.

A few differences:

The book is narrated by Krakauer and has a much more journlistic feel to it. He states everything that happened in the past tense, and McCandless has an unreal quality, because you know he's no longer alive. Seeing someone play him in a movie was strange, because you already knew he was dead. The movie was also narrated by McCandless's sister Carine instead of by Krakauer, which gave it more of an emotional feeling than the book.

One thing that bothered me about the movie was that McCandless's relationship with a young girl named Tracy completely changed. In the book the girl was almost an afterthought, someone he met while staying at an RV camp with a couple who had picked him up. The girl was portrayed as a young, immature kid who had a crush on McCandless, who was uninterested because he was too focused on his goal of getting to Alaska.

But in the movie, McCandless and the girl had formed a relationship and were spending all their time together and the girl tried to seduce him, and then Chris almost seemed weird for turning her down even though he was seven years older than her. It was just annoying that the movie had to have a girl posing as a sex obect, especially when the relationship never existed.

The other thing that changed in the movie was was McCandless's relationship with his parents. The movie implied that his parents were to blame for his departure from reality, and that his father had been abusive toward his mother. The book did seem to lay some blame on the parents, but not to the extreme that the movie did. The book stated that McCandless was frustrated with his parents' shallow and materialistic lives, and that he felt betrayed when he found out his father had already been married when he'd met McCandless's mother. But the movie took this to the extreme. At one point, McCandless heard echoes of his father screaming at his mother in his head, and it also showed a flashback of his father and mother yelling at each other and then his father hitting his mother while he and he Carine hugged each other in the background.

Other than these two small changes, the movie was very close to the book and the acting was great. It definitely made McCandless feel more real to me, and made me feel like I could understand some of the things he went through and some of the emotions he felt on his journey. Emile Hirsch did a great job playing McCandless. The only time I didn't enjoy his acting was during the incredibly long (in my opinion) scene in which he shot a moose and then prepared it to be eaten. But it was fun to meet all the characters McCandless encountered on his journey. It was also exciting to get to experience someone living so freely and having all these adventures while at the same time sitting comfortably in a movie theater and eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. It almost made me feel like a hypocrite, but I think Chris would have been happy to know that the book and the movie had inspired me to live life a little more fully and to do what makes me happy instead of just taking for granted what has been handed to me.

All in all the movie was great, but I would suggest that you read the book first and also that you bring a box of Kleenex.

For more info on the movie, visit their impressive website: www.intothewild.com.