A Field Guide To Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit turned out to be a terrible disappointment. Her book was a series of essays on the existential idea of getting lost. The idea of getting lost existentially is a good one, but one can get lost in a good book, as well as in the wilderness. I thought that the book would be about the idea of getting lost in the wilderness, or in the city scape, about being aware of your surroundings and getting lost in the beauty of a sunset. In a way each of the articles deal with her getting lost in those environment, but not how we can as individuals get lost in those surrounds, so that we can create our own lost experiences. The Publishers Weekly expressed some of the same concerns about the book, saying that the book leaves the reader feel lost while reading it. Solnit seems to be lost in her own words and isn't apologetic about it, but leaves the reader behind in her wandering and rambling. She's not really int rested in interesting her readers, as much as rambling to herself, much as one would on a blog or in a journal, but she happens to be a respected and published author with other books that have granted her the right to publish a book of her ramblings that otherwise would not have gotten published, and she may have had to think about what the book really meant, and maybe she would have produced a book on existentialism rather than the idea of getting lost.