Mountain Lines
A Journey through the French Alps
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4.0 • 25 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times best summer travel book recommendation
A nonfiction debut about an American’s solo, month-long, 400-mile walk from Lake Geneva to Nice.
In the summer of 2015, Jonathan Arlan was nearing thirty. Restless, bored, and daydreaming of adventure, he comes across an image on the Internet one day: a map of the southeast corner of France with a single red line snaking south from Lake Geneva, through the jagged brown and white peaks of the Alps to the Mediterranean sea—a route more than four hundred miles long. He decides then and there to walk the whole trail solo.
Lacking any outdoor experience, completely ignorant of mountains, sorely out of shape, and fighting last-minute nerves and bad weather, things get off to a rocky start. But Arlan eventually finds his mountain legs—along with a staggering variety of aches and pains—as he tramps a narrow thread of grass, dirt, and rock between cloud-collared, ice-capped peaks in the High Alps, through ancient hamlets built into hillsides, across sheep-dotted mountain pastures, and over countless cols on his way to the sea. In time, this simple, repetitive act of walking for hours each day in the remote beauty of the mountains becomes as exhilarating as it is exhausting.
Mountain Lines is the stirring account of a month-long journey on foot through the French Alps and a passionate and intimate book laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity. In the tradition of trekking classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Snow Leopard, and Tracks, the book is a meditation on movement, solitude, adventure, and the magnetic power of the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Arlan, a self-described "intensely lazy person," decides at age 30 to leave "a boring career behind to travel alone" on a walk that starts on the southern tip of Lake Geneva and continues to through the French Alps and finally to the Mediterranean Sea an idea that he stumbles across while Googling "various permutations of the search terms long,' mountain,' hard,' and walk.'" What he finds and what he admirably and amiably describes in this memoir is a journey of self-discovery that encompasses"the breathtaking pain that blasted upward from the soles of my feet" after his first walks; the beauty that he sees almost every day on the road ("the light on the mountains turned every direction I looked into gorgeously rendered landscape paintings"); and the surprising similarity to parts of his journey to his native Kansas ("The scenery moves so slow that you never feel like you are making any progress"). In the end, one of the pleasures of the book is that Arlan strives for no grand pronouncements as he reaches the end of his trail, just stating the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal and a reminding himself "to take it slow, to not rush."
