About The Librarium

We are people who love to read and discuss books, and The Librarium is a web-based reading and discussion group. All that is required is for you to read the selected book and then add your comment(s) to the discussion. If you would like to suggest a book for future reading please click on the "Suggest a Book" tab, or if you would like to be added as an author for this blog, please use the contact form tab. We hope you will join us!
Our Current Read – Into the Wild
"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer.
While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams."
Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.
From Publishers Weekly
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature.
Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
| Kristi on Into the Wild | |
| Jeannette Katzir on Contact Us | |
| Duane Hershberger on Into the Wild | |
| terri on Into the Wild | |
| Bonnie Geller on Suggest a Book |
Top Posts
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Lone Prairie – Julie’s Blog
- When social media refuses to get along. May 12, 2012
- When everything is shades of gray. May 14, 2012
- The green plane and the blue sky. May 16, 2012
- Never stop improving, always keep consuming. May 21, 2012
- 3 clicks or less if you want to see change. May 26, 2012
Will’s Wonderful World – Will’s Blog
- Matthew 7:1-14 (My Paraphrase) May 15, 2012
- 2 Corinthians 4:7-11 (My Paraphrase) January 28, 2012
- Take Up His Yoke January 23, 2012
- On January 20th January 20, 2012
- Enter at Your Own Risk January 20, 2012








Let the Discussion Continue (or begin)
Just because we have selected a new book for reading and discussion doesn’t mean that you can’t add to the discussion on A Canticle for Leibowitz. Just go to this post, and add your comments or questions. I hope to do just that over the next few days. I know that someone is out there [...]