What I’m Reading
I LOVE to read. Usually, I tend to stick to fiction of all type. I really love historical fiction and non-fiction accounts of historical events, too, and lately, it seems that is all I’ve been reading.
I recently finished reading The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession by David Grann. I was really excited to read this book and really thought I would love it. I didn’t. The story is beyond fascinating – daring explorers, mysterious disappearances, ancient lost civilizations about to be found. You couldn’t ask for better material. David Grann is a staff writer for the New Yorker and stumbled upon the story of Percy Fawcett when he was researching another story. In the 1920’s, Percy Fawcett was an explorer of the Amazon on a quest to find evidence of an ancient, lost civilization deep in the heart of the Amazon which would prove that certain advancements such as pottery, roads, engineering, and mathematics were not brought to South America by the Europeans but existed long before their arrival. Fawcett never returned from his last final attempt to find the elusive City of Z and speculation about his fate has been brewing ever since. The author, Grann, got swept up into the mystery as well and decided to re-trace Fawcett’s last expedition in an attempt to discover answers about Fawcett last days and whether it was possible that the City of Z did in fact exsist.
The book weaves two stories together: the story of Percy Fawcett and the story of Grann’s expedition to the Amazon. Both of these stories are fascinating and I will say (without giving anything away) that the endings to both stories were extremely satisfying. But, the writing – or should I say, more accurately, the editing of this book is so poor that it really made it a difficult book for me. Even the fascination and curiosity surrounding this real-life mystery and wanting to know how it turned out was not enough to keep up my enthusiasm. I always finish books, even those I hate. So, I did trudge on to the end. But, it was true trudging. In the end, I was glad to learn the answers but wished I had just looked it up on wikipedia or something. Lots of people disagree with me as it currently has a four-star average review on Amazon, so it could just be me.
Brad Pitt has recently been cast to play Percy Fawcett in an upcoming movie based on this book and I actually think the movie will be excellent. I mean, it really is full of adventure and intrigue and both stories – the story of Percy Fawcett and the story of Grann – are equally fascinating. I think these stories will play out better on the big-screen than on the page. But, I think, with a better editor and with a structure which allowed these stories to flow more naturally, I would have fallen in love with this book.
Up Next on my Read List: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Somtimes Lonely Man Who Created “Alice in Wonderland” by Jenny Woolf
