Wednesday, September 17, 2014

From Lost To Found On The Metro-North Train

                                     
By Grace Stearns | Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - Off the Shelf

An important part of my daily life as an apathetic Millennial involves the strategic avoidance of hype. Overenthusiasm or, even worse, earnest admiration of any kind is a social embarrassment too great to risk, regardless of whatever cultural phenomenon, life-changing product, or stale viral video on which I might be missing out. Thus, the first time I saw a review of Wild by Cheryl Strayed in Time magazine, the reviewer’s sincere delight in the book’s scope and artistry was simply too obvious for me to bother answering his imploring call to read it.

 Overlooking the apparent irony in my subsequent decision to go into book publicity, imagine my smug sense of superiority as Wild quickly took off, rocketing to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. If millions of people across the globe were raving about it, Wild likely wasn’t worth my valuable time. 

Two years later, however, the hype had died down, a waning that coincided nicely with the quiet deterioration of my collegiate arrogance. The polar vortex had descended upon New York City, and I was spending nearly twenty hours a weekend in bed, reading, pausing only to pull on additional wool socks over the ones I was already wearing. My roommate had left a copy of Wild in a stack of paperbacks on the coffee table. Two delivery orders of pad Thai, nine inches of snow, and seventeen hours later, I set Wild down beside me, astonished at what I had been missing since the book’s initial release. -  More

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