January Not Fiction Book Discussions and Readalikes

For January we read On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor, as Moor's subtitle indicates, a true essay or attempt to understand trails of all kinds.

Moor first became interested in trails while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. He thought he would write a traditional memoir about his time on the AT, with just a short chapter on trails and their history and symbolism, but then he found himself much more interested in the trails themselves. His book expanded to investigate the world's oldest fossil trails; insect communication and large herd migration; the evolution of human movement from footpaths to wagon trails to the Interstate Highway system; the history of modern hiking trails; and even the vast communication network of the Internet. We follow Moor as he follows this desire line, weaving his own experiences hiking and investigating trails into his narrative history of trails, moving from the minuscule and ancient to the vast and philosophical. Moor says, "I learned that the soul of a trail--its trail-ness--is not bound up in dirt and rocks; it is immaterial, evanescent, as fluid as air. The essence lies in its function: how it continuously evolves to serve the needs of its users. . . . To deftly navigate this world, we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us."

In our discussions, we considered the following questions. What do you think? Moor says, "Thru-hiking is metamorphosis . . ." Have you ever done something like thru-hiking the AT that changed you profoundly? What was it? Why did you do it? Did you experience any paradigm shifts or conceive of any questions regarding things you previously took for granted, as Moor did with trails? Moor asks, "Why do we hike?" Are you a hiker? Or perhaps a city walker? Why do you walk?
In an essay for The New Yorker, Why the Most Popular Hiking Memoirs Don't Go the Distance, Moor discusses what makes a successful hiking memoir. He says, "The questions arises: Why are the three most famous accounts of hiking three of the world's most famous long-distance trails written by people who did not hike the whole distance? He is referring to Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, and Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage. Have you read these books? Read Moor's article and see what you think of his assessment of their popularity. What genre is Moor's book? Which of his topics did you find most interesting? Does he create an "engaging emotional trajectory" for his readers? Were there any that you wanted to know more about? Moor notes that the creation of modern hiking trails and wilderness areas brings up the question of what is wild and what is civilized. Looking ahead to next month's book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams, what, if anything, do you think separates wilderness from civilization, and how should we work to preserve wild spaces while still allowing the kind of access that reminds us of their importance?

If you enjoyed On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor, then you might also like these reading suggestions from our discussion group members:

• The three hiking memoirs Moor discusses in his New Yorker essay, A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho.
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe and The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert.
• The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen.
• The Places in Between by Rory Stewart.
• John McPhee's books about geology. 
• The Thousand-Mile Summer by Colin Fletcher.
• Overland in Search of America by Philip Caputo.
• A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
• Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.
• Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens.
• The novels of Cormac McCarthy, such as The Border Trilogy and The Road.
• The article Life on the Edge by Terence Monmaney, from Smithsonian April 2017.
• The article Trails and Tribulations by Abigail Tucker from Smithsonian July-August 2017.

We hope you will join the discussion and share any of your reading suggestions related to On Trails here on the blog.