Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer. 1996. Anchor. 231 pages. [Source: Public Library]. I’ve been dancing around Into the Wild for nearly 20 years. I was introduced to Jon Krakauer in 2000 with his recounting of a disastrous trek up Mount Everest, Into Thin Air. I was fascinated and traumatized by it. *shrug* For just as many years, I’d been seeing Into the Wild on various book lists and finally took the plunge. Luckily, I didn’t find myself sobbing while reading this book. Instead, I traded it for a latent sense of sorrow. Reading this felt odd because it comes with a spoiler — Chris McCandless is dead. He dies alone in the woods of Alaska, and isn’t found for several weeks. It seems a particularly tragic and anticlimactic ending for someone who set out into the woods with an almost inspirational zeal for what would come next in his life. The bulk of the book, for me at least, was spent hoping to get answers to all my knee-jerk questions. Why’d he go into the Alaskan wilderness with little to nothing in the way of supplies? What happened in the woods that killed him — was it really that treacherous…
