Last month’s book club pick

Sitting here, in my sun drenched living room on the comfort of a sofa beside Pikku, I realize I am a million miles and 300 leagues from where I was supposed to go in life. The path was all laid out. Possibly before my parents were even born. But I have never been much good at walking the roads other people have paved for me. It is just somehow not who I am as a person. I have always been looking for something else. Something closed to me as a path because it was the hard unpaved road, and no one knew where it ended up. But, it couldn’t be lots of money and an easy life. So, no one wanted that for me. My grandmother, wanted me to be an english teacher like here. She wanted us all to be. But I was in love with music and too dyslexic to teach english. Grudgingly she accepted I would be a music teacher. My mom and dad, didn’t care so long as I walked the standard route the people in my family always walked. University, then maybe grad school…. Then some high powered career any would work. But that wasn’t me either. I always knew it wasn’t me. It was a desperate effort to fit a square peg into a round hole and amounted to a kind of torture psychologically equal to water boarding or stress positions. But they meant well. They wanted me to be independent and able to create a comfortable life. I appreciate the sentiment. This book reminded me of these facts about myself. I loved this book, as an unconventional woman living a million miles from a capital downtown mecca in an area that really isn’t quite the middle of nowhere but is treated as the middle of nowhere because it is so far off the course I was supposed to take.

 

This book, got mixed reviews from our book club. Not everyone loved it as much as I did, and that is ok. Everyone has different tastes. The book challenged a trope the same way that I did when I was young and looking for myself. So I understood it perfectly. I understood the feminism and I loved it. But others thought it was a cop out. They might have had a point also. I think, the main character Erin, discovered something that women and men are different and trying to be what you are not isn’t a search for equality. But allowing barriers to bar you from being your own version of something that is typically open only to men, is also unacceptable. You can be who and what you are and do a thing your own way. You can find inspiration where ever you find it. For some things in our society we can largely only look to men as society has not opened the door yet much to women. You can search for truth of self within faith and philosophy while seeking physical truth in math and science. They explore 2 different universes both of which are of value to explore. Others found the feminism canned and the fascination with the unabomber disturbing. To be fair, it did end with a letter to the latter… Which some found upsetting. Which is fair. I mean, he did send letter bombs that killed people. There is no getting around that fact and no sugar coating it nor is there forging it. He went to prison and that is where he belonged. You don’t get to lash out at other people like that! I don’t care if they won’t get off your forest lawn in the literal nowhere and they continue to encroach! Publish a manifesto. Write some books, try to discuss your views like a civilized person, because the Unabomber wrong as he was, had a few legitimately good points to make he just made them in the wrongest of wrongest of wrong ways. So I get why this was hard for some to put up with. Their position is totally fair.

The story begins in middle England, with a 19 year old girl Erin. Erin, wants to test the trope of the mountain man as a woman. She wants to test herself against some of the greatest successes in history in literature and other areas who lived out in nature and survived independently. Only in the time period Erin is going on this quest, the world is hugely different and the state of nature is very different from when those men lived and did what they did. She wants to on very little money go from England, to Alaska, where she will try this living alone in wilderness for a time, she will make a documentary and then come back. Her course takes her first to Iceland, then Greenland, Canada, and then finally Alaska. Through the book she meets men and women and has many experiences some good some ugly. Some very ugly. She reaches Alaska, where she happens to touch the life of someone who sought to do something similar who followed the philosophy to the end the bitter end a place she was not open to following because she herself found a different course to take at that point and chose that route. She explored her internal and external world and the nature around her. Then she made choices related to what she will take back with her, has experiences that feel spiritual, does some personal growth, explores the old feminism from the perspective of Gen Z, and some feel her trip is succesful. Others feel it is not. Some don’t enjoy the book at all. Others feel seen clearly for perhaps the first time in their lives, and love it. What you will get out of this book is yours to discover. I don’t do right and wrong when it is in relation to a piece of art which a book is. There is right and wrong with math equations not with works of art. So what this book will offer you…. Hard to say.

What I will say, is I hope you love it. If you don’t there are fair reasons not to. It can be a lot to wade through due to the science and discussions Erin has inside herself. So it can be a difficult read. I found it worthwhile. Others didn’t how you will find it is blowing in the wind and in the wilderness within yourself.

Our next book is supposed to be sad about what happens when your brain starts to lose your identity and it begins to fall away piece by piece prematurely. We will be reading Still Alice. Which got rave reviews.