What I read on the Trail

Consistent and accurate data section: I always knew where the next water source and grocery store were (this is the primary reason for carrying a guidebook)

No elevation profile

No southbound edition

Elevation profile integrated with landmark locations. Guessing how tough the next mountain is going to be based on its slope in the profile makes hiking fun. (Yes, it can get kind of boring out there.)

Landmarks are spaced on the page [somewhat] proportional to their physical distances from each other. That way you can get an idea of how far the next water source (for example) is simply by seeing how far down the page it is. The ALDHA guide simply uses a table with no spacial formatting.

More landmarks, tent sites, and water locations listed than the ALDHA guide. I didn’t actually do a numerical comparison, but it felt like Awol has more locations along the trail listed. I especially appreciated the number of non-official-but-established tent sites it listed, as it made it easier to plan days where I ended up between shelters instead of getting into a shelter-to-shelter rut for fear of not having a flat place to sleep.

Available in both northbound and southbound (and looseleaf of each) editions. That way southbounders don’t have to read it backwards, like they do with the ALDHA guide. Every single southbound thru-hiker I met in 2012 was using Awol’s guide.

The town maps and information pages are near the data pages so you don’t have to flip to the end of the section to read about upcoming town services (as is required by the ALDHA guide). This was nice only because I was using the loose-leaf edition, and having to always pull up pages from the back of my stack would have left me even less organized than I was.

Distances for the next three shelters were listed for each shelter (instead of only for the next shelter, as in the ALDHA guide), which made estimating the number of miles I would walk that day much easier.

Usually locations with services (like grocery) were bolded on the data page with a page number given to a separate page which described the available services, but a few grocery places were listed right on the data page. I much prefer the consistent data grid of the ALDHA guide which made it clear which services were available where without needing to flip pages.

I did less than half of the trail with Awol’s guide, but found several typos and errors. I emailed the most annoying errors I found to David Miller, so I assume they will be corrected in the 2013 edition.

The Kingdom of God is Within You - I read this before What I Believe even though it is largely a follow-up to that book. This book (along with What I Believe) almost made a pacifist of me (and resonated with my pre-existing anarchist sympathies).

My Religion - What I Believe - Tolstoy’s interpretation of Jesus’s teachings, based almost entirely on the Sermon on the Mount, along with the implications of those teachings on his own life. His interpretation is at the same time compelling and entirely at odds with orthodox theology.

The Gospel in Brief - A somewhat repetitive 12-point summary of Tolstoy’s Christianity in the form of a miracle-less paraphrase of the gospels.

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Don’t worry, I only read the first part, and skipped some sections.

Second Treatise of Government by John Locke.

The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau. I read only the first book. After that it was getting too specific and civics-class-ish.

The Law by Frederic Bastiat. Very lucid; I would not have guessed this was first published over 160 years ago.

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. I only read the first essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” by Rand. I love that essay.

Crimes of Dissent: Civil Disobedience, Criminal Justice, and the Politics of Conscience by Jarret Lovell. Consists of sometimes interesting usually boring accounts of civil disobedience and something or other to do with criminal justice.

“On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill. Such a good and agreeable thinker. Even if his essays are too long.

Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Colin Ward. A disappointing summary of anarchism. I recently found out the local library has the entire “Very Short Introduction” series, so I can read these without having to spend $7!

Anarchism and Socialism by G.V. Plekhanov. I don’t know how I found this book or how old it is, but it is a critique of anarchism form a Marxist (“scientific socialism”) point of view. It addresses the major 19th century anarchist thinkers (Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin).

Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory by E. V. Zenker. A late 19th-century history and criticism of anarchism. The author has obviously spent very much time reading and understanding the various anarchist traditions of the 19th century, and offers some good criticism. A dense book, and I didn’t quite finish it.

Marx: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer. Very readable summary of Marx by a non-Marxist. Singer even makes sense of Hegel in a few clear paragraphs! (I also note that he has written the book on Hegel in the same series, though I haven’t read that.)

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. The famous argument against planned economies. I read 50% of this on the trail (still haven’t finished). I was surprised at how mainstream Hayek is in this book in recommending government providing services which don’t lend themselves well to competition. Almost nothing of the market-libertarianism I expected considering the “Tea Party”'s acceptance of this book.