By VIKTORIA SUNDQVIST

Stretching from Maine to northern Georgia, the Appalachian Trail runs about 2,100 miles along the East Coast of the United States. It takes you through 350 mountain tops and beautiful valleys; it features deep woods and glittering streams.

Hiking the entire trail takes about five months.

No, I am not planning on going for a hike - Bill Bryson is. Or rather, he was. He already took the hike, back in 1996, and then he wrote a book about it.

In his usual fashion, Bryson intrigues me immediately. I can totally picture this slightly goofy, middle-aged man sitting on his New Hampshire couch thinking one day, "I'm gonna hike 2,000 miles!" His wife, of course, thought it a bad idea from the start.

From the adventure of buying expensive equipment that may or may not be neccessary to finding a friend and partner in crime to share the experience with, Bryson's story brings me along for the ride (For me, it is actually very comfortable. I don't have to lift more than my arms to hold the book up, and most of the time it is resting against the bed anyway).

The story feels like it could be my own. Not that I would ever go for such a long walk. But if I did, similar things would happen (is it really such a good idea to leave food on the ground when camping in bear territory?). I just wish I could write about them like Bryson does.

Bryson uses humor in ways other writers can only dream of - maybe it's his honesty that's so appealing.

I've often pondered dropping by Hanover, New Hampshire, to see Bill Bryson. It's a small college town. If I ask people where Bill Bryson lives, they might just tell me.

I'm not quite sure how well my visit would go over, though. Although I feel like I know Bryson from reading (most of) his books, I am quite certain he would stare blankly at me and say "who did you say you are again?" and "you are writing an article about me for WHAT paper?"

Hope is still alive and well that I will get to meet him one day. For now, though, I still have his books. And we've got lots of miles left to hike together on the Appalachian Trail.

By VIKTORIA SUNDQVIST

Last year when I had to have surgery, I brought Enid Blyton’s “The Island of Adventure” with me to the hospital. I figured the easy-to-read children’s book would help pass the time without making me completely exhausted.

I had read it many times before - when I was a lot younger, of course, and have always enjoyed reading anything she has written.

I was discharged from the hospital before I made it to Chapter 4, but at least the book brought me to the rocky hillside of north Britain for a few hours. With sentences like “It was pleasant at tea time that day” and “It was really most extraordinary,” I almost started reading it with a British accent.

During my first few days home from the surgery, a friend dropped by with a stack of books. “P.S. I Love You” by Cecelia Ahern immediately caught my attention, and it took me to Ireland for about a week, where people go to pubs and wear trainers and knickers and jumpers and sometimes have to go to hospital (without the “the,” which has always fascinated me – how can British English and American English be so different in some regards?).

Ahern's book was delightful, although a bit sad since it centers around coping with the loss of a loved one and how to move on.

Another book dropped into the mail a few days later from a friend in Sweden – “500 Reasons Why I Hate The Office.” It seemed like the perfect book at first, but after skimming through the first 65 pages or so, I realized it was just a bit too British for me. Perhaps I just didn't get it because I don’t work in a regular office, where “client entertainment” or “office creeps” or “dress codes” are discussed on a regular basis. It was funny, though, to read about organisations (spelled with an “s” instead of a “z”) and “socialising (same thing) with colleagues.”

But it wasn’t until I picked up Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island,” – where he tours England one last time before moving back to the United States – that I realized all my recent books had centered around the British isles. Bryson took me on a delightful trip via motorways and Marks & Spencer to zebra crossings and Towcester (pronounced “toaster,” allegedly). And again, I am reminded how much I like his humor and self-loathing voice.

By LESLIE PARSONS

It saddens me, maybe more than it should, that my inaugural post on the book blog be such a lukewarm review, especially consider that the book in question was written by one of my favorite authors.

Joyce Carol Oates - a woman who has appeared on my "Top 5 Public Figures I'd Have to a Dinner Party" list and countless other celebrity worship lists I've constructed in times of no better occupation - has failed to inspire me as she usually does.

In her latest work - at least I believe it to be her latest work, it is very possible in the few days it took me to read this book that she has published again - she tells the story of a 15-year-old nanny, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks summer transplant in an affluent harbor town, who becomes the object of affection, attention, and art for a 68-year-old man of note in the town whom she fears? loves? hates? admires? envies? understands? Katya struggles to process her hardly post-pubescent feelings for Mr. Kidder as the darkness of his desires become clear.

For me, the story fails in its telling - which is unfortunate considering that the tale itself is poignant, mysterious, and captivating. In what seems an effort to develop an underlying theme of the perversion of fairy tale, the author uses base, repetitive prose, forced allegory and trite language delivered from her characters to evoke the Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties of our past, but some ideas are just better on paper.

But we trudge through the narrative, driven by the plot and our desire to know what will become of Katya when public encounters with Mr. Kidder turn to private, late-night rendezvous in his art studio in progressing stages of undress. And as the tale of an attractive, trim, blond girl from a notorious family - an alcoholic mother, an absent father, and a recently un-jailed kissing cousin - is juxtaposed against the wealth and privilege of the affluent Bayhead Harbor, striking moments develop that, quite honestly took this humble reader's breath away.

But you wait. You wait for those moments, flipping through pages of the stale development of the leading characters' interactions.

I found myself wishing against the safety of young Katya simply so that something would happen during the slow escalation of their relationship. It wasn't deliciously slow, as some moments spent waiting for the rise of action in a novel can be. I didn't find myself savoring the early progress of their encounters. It was just slow.

I should admit, though, that I'm spoiled by Oates' short fiction. I was first introduced to the author when one of her short stories came across my Little Tykes desk many years ago. OK, maybe it wasn't that long ago, but I have been with her for a long time. Her short stories are like Lindor truffles - small, perfectly wrapped, easily savored, complex, just this side of overwhelming, and available at any Barnes and Noble. I would have preferred this 165-page novel as a short story, I imagine.

But this leaves unanswered, due in no small part to the amblings of my own prose, the question that any book review seeks to address. Do you read this book? To which I say, yes, of course, because the worst of Joyce Carol Oates is better than the best of most authors, and I wouldn't even consider this the worst.

I look forward to reading "Dear Husband," a collection featuring the latest of Oates' short fiction, where I can once again return to one of my favorite authors in one of my favorite forms.