Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Book 26/30.

My rating: DNF on page 69

I have not DNFd a book since August 2017 but yikes this was BAD! BAD!! BAD!!!

In my review of We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates I said that it was THE MOST BORING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!, but I take it back. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is officially THE MOST BORING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!, though you can technically say I did not read it as I DNFd it on page 69 (😈), but hey, semantics.

This was sooo boring and for the life of me I cannot understand why it has an average rating of 4.0 from 1,039,561 people on Goodreads. It is only 203 pages long but even getting to page 69 was a challenge as it read like a goddamn Wikipedia page. Which makes sense when you realise that this story started out as a 9,000 word article for the January 1993 issue of Outside magazine until Jon Krakauer, haunted by the particulars of Alex’s starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and Alex’s, expanded on his article and wrote this book.

I was initially planning to skim read this so I can claim to have finished the book, but after seven chapters I asked myself “WHY??!” Why should I torture myself by skim reading this boring ass book just so I can say I finished it, yet I have subzero connection to it??! There is a movie adaptation of this and while I have not and will not watch it, I can bet that the movie is infinitely better than the book.

It takes A LOT for me to DNF a book and before this I had only DNFd 5 books (Chloe, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Twelfth Night, The Alienist and Lolita— in that order) in my 30 decades of reading but fucking hell this is godawful and life is too short to read godawful books ✌️

View all my reviews

** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing