Newly returned to the United States after two decades in England, Bill Bryson hits on a plan to reacquaint himself with his native country: he will hike the Appalachian Trail, the 2,100-mile footpath running from Georgia to Maine through the great eastern forest. He has, by his own cheerful admission, almost no idea what he is doing. His only companion is Stephen Katz, an old friend from his Iowa youth, now wildly overweight, recovering from various excesses, and constitutionally allergic to physical effort. A Walk in the Woods is the chronicle of their stumbling, bickering, frequently hilarious attempt, and it has become one of the best-loved travel books of its era for good reason.
Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive, and the comedy here is close to perfect, much of it generated by the magnificent figure of Katz, who hurls food out of his pack to lighten the load and greets every hardship with profane despair. The two men's grumbling rapport, the parade of oddballs they meet at shelters, the small daily indignities of the trail, all of it is rendered with Bryson's gift for the perfectly timed sentence. You laugh out loud, repeatedly and helplessly, and that alone would carry the book.
But underneath the jokes runs something more substantial. Between the blisters and bear scares, Bryson keeps stopping to tell you things, about the geology and ecology of the Appalachians, the alarming decline of America's native trees, the history and mismanagement of the trail and the forests around it. He is genuinely alarmed by what is being lost, and the book quietly becomes an argument for the value of wild places even as it mocks the discomfort of being in them. The one thing readers should know going in is that Bryson and Katz do not, in the end, walk the whole trail, a fact that frustrates some hikers who want a completist's account; this is a book about the attempt and the woods, not a triumphant thru-hike.
Why you should read
- Readers who want travel writing that's genuinely funny
- Anyone who loves hiking or the American outdoors
- Fans of Bryson's curious, digressive nonfiction
- Those who like a heartfelt tribute to wild places under the jokes
What to expect
- Big laughs and a great comic sidekick in Katz
- Real natural history and forest ecology woven in
- An attempt at the trail, not a completist thru-hike
- A funny book that turns surprisingly tender
What you're left with is a rare hybrid: a book that makes you laugh until you ache and then, almost without your noticing, makes you care. The comedy never curdles into mere mockery, and the natural history never hardens into a lecture; the two hold each other in balance the whole way. It is the sort of travel writing that sends some readers straight to the outfitter and others straight to the couch, grateful to have done it vicariously, and either way it leaves you with a deepened tenderness for the American wilderness and a real unease about how casually we are letting it slip away. Warm, funny, and quietly elegiac, it has earned its long life on the shelf, and it remains the rare book that can make you snort with laughter and then, a page later, feel the genuine ache of something irreplaceable being lost.
