Along the way, there’s plenty of pathos, adventure, horror, and enough incredibly funny sections that I never knew where the tone was about to head. Suffice it to say that The Hike is about a journey (well, okay, a hike) that starts in a very mundane place and ends up somewhere nobody could ever expect. This blog will continually be skirting the edge of spoilers, since I’m fully in opposition to anything that ruins a perfectly good book or movie for unsuspecting folks. But the protagonist here realizes just how much he’d do to get it all back. We probably feel we have a boring life, and wish that wasn’t the case. It’s a book about choices–those huge, life-altering choices we make, even though we don’t truly realize they’re made until after the fact. I found The Hike to be easy to get sucked into, and hard to stop reading. Not very high on the readability index, that one. So is The Lord of the Rings an amazing novel? Of course! Would I read it for the first time now, in 2016? Of course not–that’s about 75 pages too many of preparations to leave the Shire. But there are too many books to read, and too few years to do it in. If the tone, setting, and general vibe of a book really sucks me in, I’m much more likely to follow that rabbit-hole all the way to the end. But this post is about The Hike, so let’s get into it. His earlier work The Postmortal is a really, really good examination of some of the potential ramifications of immortality, and I’d encourage everyone to read it. I’ve been a fan of this author for several years. I love that guy, I think his most recent work is some of his best, but nobody needs to advertise for his latest novel.

I’d like this blog to be an exercise in promoting amazing books by authors that might not be the Stephen Kings of the world, celebrity-wise.

The hike drew magary review