I'm nearing the end of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. As before, I find his writing gripping and erudite even when the subject is so beyond my purview of my experiences. While the story of the young self-proclaimed "super tramp" who met his death in the Alaska wilderness is tragic, I kinda agree with this guy's take on the matter:

His ignorance, which could have been cured by a USGS quadrant and a Boy Scout manual, is what killed him. And while I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance . . . amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill - just another case of under-prepared, over-confident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. It's all a matter of degree. McCandless's contrived asceticism and a pseudo-literary stance compound rather than reduce the fault . . . McCandless's postcards, notes, and journals . . . read like the work of an above average, somewhat histrionic high school kid - or am I missing something?

At the other end of the spectrum, ever feel this way about a book?

You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse' through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the einforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, eyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the
stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. Merely what it deserves, neither more nor less.

--italo calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler