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Before the Fame, by Stompin' Tom Conners in his own words. RIP Tom, you were a great song writer and entertainer!
 
Finished this the other day.
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Darker than than the first book. But better environmental descriptions. I find i get bogged down and bored by his long diatribes into metaphysics/god, so I kinda just gloss through them. And the ending didn't sit well with me, I think I know what he was going for, but it felt unpolished.
 
Been on a mountaineering kick again lately. Just finished Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Great story, although it is terribly sad. The mistakes made on Everest that year (probably mostly due to hypoxia) are beyond jaw dropping. It never ceases to amaze me the risks taken in mountaineering and exploration. 100 years ago it was something men somehow considered necessary, there was a sense of duty involved, and now it seems to me it has shifted to more of a search for meaning and glory
 
Been on a mountaineering kick again lately. Just finished Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Great story, although it is terribly sad. The mistakes made on Everest that year (probably mostly due to hypoxia) are beyond jaw dropping. It never ceases to amaze me the risks taken in mountaineering and exploration. 100 years ago it was something men somehow considered necessary, there was a sense of duty involved, and now it seems to me it has shifted to more of a search for meaning and glory
Krakauer is one of my all-time favorites writers. Wish he’d come out with something new.
 
Finished this the other day.
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Darker than than the first book. But better environmental descriptions. I find i get bogged down and bored by his long diatribes into metaphysics/god, so I kinda just gloss through them. And the ending didn't sit well with me, I think I know what he was going for, but it felt unpolished.

You nailed it, he wanders a lot. I read that a couple months ago and now going to read Cities on the Plain...
 
Finished this the other day.
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Darker than than the first book. But better environmental descriptions. I find i get bogged down and bored by his long diatribes into metaphysics/god, so I kinda just gloss through them. And the ending didn't sit well with me, I think I know what he was going for, but it felt unpolished.
That’s fair, but then he comes up with a brilliant ‘aside’ such as the diamond merchant in The Counselor.
 
Finished this the other day.
View attachment 306665
Darker than than the first book. But better environmental descriptions. I find i get bogged down and bored by his long diatribes into metaphysics/god, so I kinda just gloss through them. And the ending didn't sit well with me, I think I know what he was going for, but it felt unpolished.
I know what you mean, but I absolutely love his work. The detail in his landscapes and characters is spot on and he really puts you there. There are authors that ramble on needlessly, but to me Cormac ties it together in a unique way that really drags the feels out of a guy
 
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I've read sections of this one before, but I'm trying to get the whole thing read while at the in-laws for Christmas. It's a bit to bite off at 700 and some pages. Some thoughts....

-T.R. was a naturalist. It's amazing the kinship I feel with his observations and experiences as an outdoorsman. This is combined with good writing skills, and makes for a really pleasurable read.

-He was convinced that what he saw was all going to be gone shortly. Most of the book is set in the 1890s, and he believed 10-20 years would see game gone, and the land broken into small farms in the eastern Montana area his ranch was in (I'm not intimately familiar with this area, and I know a lot of you are.). And I believe he was right, but I wonder what he would think to see what the last 100 years have held for wild game and places here in America. And what he might think of the current concerns with game management in the same area he describes in the book.

- He would not be well accepted in our modern ethical structure. Seriously. The amount of haphazard powder burning is hard to wrap your mind around. He and his cohorts shot at anything they thought they had a chance to kill. Many times in the book you read about legs getting broken and animals not recovered. This is an interesting juxtaposition to his melancholy about game being wiped out. It's like he felt ( and I believe this was a prevailing line of thought) that it was all going away, and one might as well get what he can.
His meat recovery was not always great either. Sometimes it was only the choicest bits taken. I suppose without modern refrigeration sometimes they only took what they could eat.
This has all been interesting to think about. I'm not going to start shooting haphazardly, and I hate the idea of not doing a clean job. But if one thinks about it, we as humans are really the only part of the system that is concerned with this. Disease and starvation aren't bothered by suffering, and the meat rots away or is eaten by scavengers. Predators aren't worried about suffering, although in this case the carcass is usually at least partially eaten. It almost makes me feel like a bit of an outsider to this circle of life to be taken up with only killing cleanly.

-To sum it up, it's a great book. Just don't judge him by our current standards. We are incredibly fortunate that his time in the outdoors formed his love of wild places, and resulted in so many places being conserved.
 
Just starting A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway.

Anyone else find it interestingly difficult to read early 20th century literature considering the sentence structure and punctuation? Extremely different than I was taught in school.
 
I got a collection of Cory Ford writings for Christmas. The last story in the book is “The Road to Tinkhamtown”. An outstanding short read.

 
Almost current with Greaney's Gray Man installments...honestly, they're entertaining enough, but I couldn't hardly describe one book from the previous after beginning the next.
 

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