Genre: Adventurous Biography
Basic Plot: Following the journal of one man’s journey through the adventure of life and his version of exploration. Starting with living as a hobo travelling by trains, to hiking the Andes, he never seems to slow, but always stops to appreciate the experiences.
Road Stories shows a good potential for an autobiographical hermit tale. The author’s experiences felt genuine and in a lot of moments, makes you pine for your own exploration to write about. It’s filled with small details that display what the vagabond lifestyle romanticizes. It delivers all the experience that it promises to hold within it’s pages, except those thought provoking insights. In my opinion, it was more abruptly delivered than I would have expected from writing in this category. It felt more matter of fact, peppered with small doses of the beautiful writing I craved from it. I appreciate the author not getting too extravagant and going off the rails with profound ideology, but I do wish it was a slight amount more. It’s very short and covers a lot of experiences but I never felt truly what hit him the hardest throughout this journal. What people had the biggest impact and why? What experiences meant the most and how did it affect him on a deeper level? Maybe he just was experiencing everything for what it was and nothing had a lasting impact, but I can’t imagine someone who traipsed through these whirlwind experiences wouldn’t have more to say about it’s beauty.
Personally, I only gave it a 3 out of 5 because even though it’s a wonderful story of someone’s life and is interesting, it just didn’t reach the potential I believe it could have held. These types of stories are less common in today’s modern age and for someone to live like this and have it all written out for us to enjoy, I would have just expected a little more heart from. Otherwise, it was overall a very good book and I do still recommend it for the category.
