Born To Run (or not) by Christopher McDougall

Here we go with another journalist.  Those readers who drift more towards non-fiction are probably appreciative of the research-laden books that journalists publish.  Everything you always wanted to know about, in this case, ultra running, all condensed, to an extent, in one book. 

In my case, I prefer fiction, which can benefit from good research, as seasoning; but does not become the main entrée for a meal.  All the way through this book, I pictured the author, not participating in yet another screwy running event; but rather sprawled out like I am right now, in front of my computer, digging up vignettes from the Internet and printing them all out until the author had scores of human interest blurbs from all around the world related to running.  Then he wove them together into a cohesive a story as he could muster.

So, for me, this sort of book has to balance the research with a pervasive plot line.  Many of our journalist books these past few years did a good job of this:  Henrietta Lacks had good balance and a plot that carried; Sanctuary of Outcasts carried the plotline, but it was an evil one.  Bliss by Eric Weiner and Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick are my epitomes of bad balance.  Demick at least tried with a bad subject; Weiner didn’t even try to make sense of his “old stories”.

Ultra Running

No one knows anything about it.!.!

No one cares about this arcane subject.!.!

Why not.?.?  ---  because it’s boring.!.!.!

 

I like to talk about “take-away”-s from a book experience: lessons learned; knowledge gained; improvements to my lifestyle, diet, knowledgebase, personality, skill set, love life, handling of interpersonal relationships.

What came to mind in review was:

-     Run barefoot

-     Eat vegetarian

The problem is, the author didn’t do either.  He didn’t walk the walk.

He wore big boots or $200 running shoes all the time.

He ate like a fully-fledged carnivore, an American carnivore at that – red meat with processed food supplements.  YUK.!.!

 

Did I sympathize with him in the “Big” race ? ---  NO.! ---

He seemed like a big, fat slob that deserved to take 12 hours to complete what other did in 6 hours.

The Weird Sisters

They’re not weird at all.

These sisters are perfectly normal.

The author seems to be exploring her own fantasy world of what could/should/might have been in her life.  Perfectly viable territory, but in a novel of one’s own life, we wind up in dream-land, with happy endings for all concerned, and not too many moral resolutions.  I hesitate to use the words, … .. woman’s writing.  I stand for this opinion, as a male, with characterizations of: vapid, endlessly chatty, and oft-times purposeless.  To be balanced, men are often: vulgar, brusque, and are most-times into (war, sports, and themselves); and that’s men’s writing, which, being a man, I like better than women’s writing.  But that doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other: just that each of us has our own.  No different than, we don’t read, and thus not like [or dislike] Pakistani or Portuguese literature either.

 

I read this as an autobiographical treatise on the author’s split personality, as exemplified through the three sisters.  Who is speaking, as if it is not a single voice, but rather representing all concerned. ?

There are no sisters.!  It’s a single voice; a clearly unchanging single voice.

It is the voice of the author’s self, with the three sister characters’ lifestyles that she envied, wished for, but never actually experienced for herself.  This is not a, “Hey, this is how I grew up, but I changed the names” type of story.

These characters are extremely composite and will each come out -1-, -5-, or -10- on a 1-10 scale of things like “free spirit” [Cordy-10; Bean-5; Rose-1]  or like responsibility [Cordy-1; Bean-5; Rose-10], ie, Cookie-cutter characters.

Trying to move on from the characters, we run into the same problem with the plot line(s).  The author is pacing the book to wind up in Nirvana for all characters involved.  Now, life doesn’t improve everyone’s lot by the same amount each day, but here we find that strangely, everyone’s current and future situation seems to progress evenly, sustainably, and uniformly from the day they come “home”.  It’s the magic elixir: generally LOVE, but with a mix of: purpose for Bean; companionship for Cordy; and Faith for Rose.  All these things are of course of biblical origins: Faith, Hope, and Charity.

As a book club title, and in the continuing interest of the library readership, this was an OK book.  Nouns and verbs are in the right places.  Some sort of plot line advanced periodically.

For our sort of book, this met the minimum standard, but it dwelled for long periods in the fantasy region of the truly weird, to make a pun.