A middle-aged travel writer resolves to hike all 2,100-plus miles of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine with his out-of-shape, recovering-alcoholic old friend Katz, and the two stumble through blizzards, bears, exhaustion, and the trail's oddball hikers and towns while never quite making it the whole way.
Books mentioned in A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (10)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “Herman Melville, living on a farm called Arrowhead on its western side, stared at it from his study window while he wrote Moby-Dick”
Into the Mountains by Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow: “according to Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow in their excellent Into the Mountains, a history of New England's peaks”
The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson: “I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent”
Neither Here nor There by Bill Bryson: “Those of you...who have read Neither Here nor There will recall Katz as my traveling companion around Europe”
Deliverance by James Dickey: “The word that clings to every hiker's thoughts in north Georgia is Deliverance, the 1970 novel by James Dickey”
Natural Acts by David Quammen: “Consider a small story related by David Quammen in his book Natural Acts”
Delaware Diary by Frank Dale: “as Frank Dale notes in his excellent book Delaware Diary, there was a flood that even now is remembered as 'the Big One.'”
In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee: “as John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000”
Meditations at 10,000 Feet by James Trefil: “In Meditations at 10,000 Feet, writer and geologist James Trefil calculates...”