In 2018, I spent 5 months hiking the Appalachian Trail, a 3,200 km trail that runs from Maine to Georgia. I had a kindle with me the entire time so I could read in my tent at night. 

There’s a lot of books about the Appalachian Trail. It’s a terrifyingly difficult but beautiful experience that makes you want to write a book after you get through it. The most popular (and my least favourite) is Bill Bryson’s Walk in the Woods. Less well-known, but definitely one of my favourites, is Jennifer Pharr Davis’ Becoming Odyssa. 

Just after graduating college, the burning flame of wanderlust led her to Springer Mountain in Georgia, the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. Her friends and family thought she was crazy. Once the wanderlust died down and the adversity seemed impossible, she started to think she was crazy too. 

She not only finished hiking the entire trail, 6 years later in 2011, she hiked it again and set the fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail completing it in 46 days. 

The book is less about hiking than it is about self-discovery and “learning to smile and laugh just for me, even if no one else was around”. If you’re an inspiring female solo traveler, this book will fill you with the courage to take the first step. 

From the book:

In college we had a class discussion about whether the tale of Odysseus taking ten years to return home in the midst of magic, gods, distraction, and disaster could be a real story. I was the only one in the class who thought it was possible. Now it all made sense. I had just spent the past four months traveling a 2,175-mile footpath. And during that time, I had been struck by lightning and caught in a blizzard. I met a pirate, escaped a stalker, and encountered illegal drugs. I walked with a moose, avoided serpents of supernatural size, and fought with dark armies (of bugs). I suffered unexplained ailments, underwent spells of fatigue, and was rescued countless times by complete strangers. My best friend was a traveling comedian and minstrel, and I happily took part in a romantic subplot with a mysterious and handsome man. I had been met by a higher power Who guided me along the path, and even when I came face to face with death, I continued to seek out life.

Highly recommend Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I heard about it while reading an article about Stanford’s Three Book program for incoming students. Using a line from Marjorie, this is a book you can “feel inside you”. Powerful lines:

1. He didn’t understand. Even after his translator spoke to him, he didn’t understand.
2. The dark brown circles of his irises looked like large pots that toddlers could drown in, and he looked at Effia just like that, as though he wanted to keep her there, in his drowning eyes.
3. The curse may have been rooted in a lie, but perhaps it bore the fruit of truth.
4. Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.
5. “You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”
6. Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
7. “These people do not come from nature,” she said.
8. White men smiling just meant more evil was coming with the next wave.
9. Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.
10. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”
11. They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.
12. He had known his grandfather only as a person knows his shadow, as a figure that is there, visible but untouchable, unknowable.
13. Whether he stole, whether he lied, whether he promised alliance to the Fantes and power to the Asantes, the white man always found a way to get what he wanted.
14. Maybe he’d be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.
15. “All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”
16. Though she had never been there, she could sense its presence in her life. A premonition. A forward memory.
17. Harlem was about the sky.
18. If she did hear it, if he did come, she would close her eyes quick, and the two of them would play the game of make-believe, acting like the people onstage at the club did. Robert’s role was to slip in quietly beside her, and hers was to not question, to let him believe that she still believed in him, in them.
19. In Harlem, Lenox Avenue was impossible to avoid. It was where all the dirty, ugly, righteous, and beautiful things were.
20. “A poet’s got to spend more time livin’ than he does studyin’,”
21. “We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
22. And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother
23. For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go.
24. He was mad at her because he didn’t have a father, and she was mad at him because he’d become as absent as his own.
25. “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.” She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.
26. She said that those were the books that she could feel inside of her.
27. It was one thing to research something, another thing entirely to have lived it. To have felt it. How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.

The dramatic irony of that last line is unbearably beautiful.