Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (by Cheryl Strayed)

This was such a bizarre reading experience -- having nothing to do with the book itself, but with the various formats I tried to read it in. First, I read Strayed's piece in The Sun Magazine about the death of her mother and was completely blown away. I found her writing as "Dear Sugar" overly mannered and precious at times, so I had always resisted reading Wild thinking her style was maybe not for me. But I loved that essay so much, I decided to dive in and read Wild.

I was also looking for a new audiobook, and this seemed like a perfect story to listen to. I was hoping Strayed had narrated herself, because I heard her speak at a Hillary Clinton campaign event (sigh) and enjoyed her way of telling a story. But it was a different narrator. And I can't even put my finger on why, exactly, but a few commute-lengths into the book and I was done. I hated the narrator's voice so much that I dreaded pressing play, and it was actually ruining a wonderful book. So then I bought it on Kindle instead.

Except then the Kindle version was the "Oprah edition," so every so often a paragraph would be underlined in blue text and there would be a "note from Oprah" telling you some banal thing like "oh, I would have been so scared of the frogs!" or "I really loved this sentence!"  Nothing against Oprah but who gives a rat's ass if Oprah is scared of frogs, I just wanted to read Wild. And it pulled me out of the actual words and story every single time

So I pushed through a lot of irritation, I'm saying, to get to the end of Wild. But it's worth it, because indeed it is wonderful, as wonderful as the essay that kicked off this thing. I returned the stupid Oprah edition on my Kindle though. Whenever I want to re-read it, I'm going back to nature, and buying myself a good old paperback.