Into The Wild

In the middle of my studying for my exames, I still found the time to finish reading Jon Krakauer's based-on-a-reallife-story 'Into the wild'. Since the author is a journalist, his writing style is very analytic and there's barely a hint of imagination, even if he does start to speculate he always mentions it. The story is quite gripping and makes you think about the brainwaves some people seem to have. The story tells us about the last years of Chris McCandless (I think many have heard of Sean Penn's latest movie, which is based on and has the same title as this novel) and facts about his time before he became this 'strider' (going into 'Lord of the Rings'), this wanderer.

It reads like an interesting report you can read in the newspaper. Like any good journalist, Krakauer gives us the facts, and nothing but the facts. Every now and then he gives his own opinion of what happened to Chris, he even goes as far as to compare himself to McCandless. This is different from the movie. In the movie only the story of Chris is told, but in the book Krakauer gives many more examples of men (yes, funnily enough only men seemed to have felt the need to escape society and seek out the danger in nature) having done the same thing, of whom many have never returned.

The story is also filled with quotations of famous writers like Jack London, Thoreau and other novelties. Mostly because McCandless highlighted those passages. Even though most people would say McCandless was out of him mind to try to survive in the wilderness, I don't think he was mad. He had a sensible mind (I think that's safe to say, cause he reads books like Tolstoy, Thoreau and has strong opinions of government, etc. Though somewhere I think he was just very dissapointed with life and people. I think you'll see why if you read the book).

I'd suggest you'd try it. It's not much (just 200 pages), and has beautiful parts and they sometimes just nail it. All right, that made very thing just incomprehensible, but just read it.

I enjoyed it very much.

I Present: Our Garden

Months after my parents decided to 'restyle' the garden, it finally looks like something. Our garden is probably seven by eleven (meters, mind you) and almost made entirly out of stone. That used to be different, before the 'wish for room' we had more a backyard than a garden. Lots of plants, grass and little room to walk. Just two places that could barely hold a round table and six chairs, which was always difficult with the celebration of, for instance, birthdays, we had barely room to sit and the people who came over were always devided into two (sometimes even three) groups.

Since the weather is starting to be nice again - lots of sunshine - I've been outside more and I must say that I'm really starting to like our garden! So much room! And the plants in pots make it really cozy. Of course, not everything is stone, at the sides we've got some dirt with still developing flowers and other sorts of plants.

I can't wait for the summer!