If you know anything about me, aside from my love of books, you may know that my next biggest love is walking. I have walked a full marathon. I've walked so many half marathons that I've lost track. And a great thing to make the time pass while walking, is an audiobook. An audiobook about walking, well.... And by one of my favorite actors from my youth? Done.
So Andrew McCarthy walked the Camino de Santiago in his late 20s/early 30s and it changed his life. He's always been a big traveler but that walk was different--it was a touchstone that affected everything that came after it. And he wanted the same thing for his twenty-year-old son Sam, who was, against Andrew's advice, pursuing a career in acting, and also is inevitably pulling away and developing his own life. So Andrew saw it also as a way to connect, before their lives pull them apart. Inevitably as with any book about a long walk, there is talk of blisters and walking sticks, and while I appreciated that the details of how and where they stayed each night was not a huge chunk of the book, the lack of it also left me with questions. Not important ones, but questions nonetheless. Sam is a typical adolescent in a lot of ways--won't get up in the morning, has started smoking--but refreshingly atypical in others, wanting to discuss philosophy and the universe with his dad. He's also going through his first major breakup which is devastating. Walking is the best medicine. For both of them. It was a great reminder that on days when Andrew wakes up in a bad mood, walking will cure it. I think that's true of everyone. Certainly it is for me. Scores of times I haven't wanted to go for a walk but did anyway, and I'll bet only twice did I still feel that way thirty minutes later. And I survived those two times.
This was a nice listen. Andrew's voice is very calming. And it was an interesting listen in that Sam also recorded his bits of dialogue. I haven't heard that done before. Once or twice I did wonder, if upon recording what he'd said back then, he cringed now. It's not a how-to walk or a history of the Camino, It's not a book about parenting (although if you liked Mary Louise Kelly's recent memoir, It Goes So Fast about the last year her older son was at home before college, you'll definitely also like this one.) It's hard to define. But it's about a period of a couple of months during which Andrew McCarthy and his son walked across Spain, learning a lot about themselves and each other along the way. And I enjoyed going along for the ride.
I downloaded this digital audiobook from my local library via Libby.
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