Why I gave up on Three Cups of Tea

I ran across Three Cups of Tea in the library and thought it sounded interesting.

The introduction made it sound interesting. A true story about a charismatic man who performed miracles of people-connecting to get schools set up in Pakistan and other countries.

However, the first chapter quickly dulled any interest I had had.

The story is Greg Mortenson's. The writer is David Oliver Relin.

The first two paragraphs describe the setting, the mountain K2. The third paragraph is this:

On the afternoon of September 2, 1993, Greg Mortenson felt as if he were scarcely traveling any faster [than the frozen river of the previous paragraph]. Dressed in a much-patched set of mud-colored shalwar kamiz, like his Pakistani porters, he had the sensation that his heavy black leather mountaineering boots were independently steering him down the Baltoro at their own glacial speed, through an armada of icebergs arrayed like the sails of a thousand ice-bound ships.

And it goes on like that. More descriptions of scenery, metaphors galore, and far more details than anyone without a photographic memory could possibly remember from 15 years ago.

Some people like descriptions of scenery and flowery language. I can do without them, but I'm usually prepared to read past them for something of interest. It's the details and the getting into Mortenson's head that really started to bug me. He 'felt', 'he had the sensation', later he 'expected' and 'hadn't yet realized'. It seems to me that we're too much in his head, for something written about a real person, by someone else, in third person.

Worse yet, just a few paragraphs later is discussion of something that happened on K2 in 1909. Then Mortenson clutches a necklace made by his sister, so we get a digression into his past all about his sister. Then randomly we get mention of something that happened 'three months earlier', though I'm not clear earlier than when. By the time we're a few pages in, I'm completely lost as to what happened when and if Mortenson is alone on K2 or not.

And, frankly, I hadn't signed up for a story about extreme mountain-climbing. So I gave up. And pulled out an old collection of Ray Bradbury stories that I was glad to have just picked up from the same library.

Is this sloppy writing and/or bad choice of style? The author blurb says Relin has won 'more than forty national awards for his writing and editing'. And he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. So it would seem the answer is no.

I don't read many books of this type. I'm not even sure what you'd call it exactly. Travelogue? Memoir? But written by someone else. Is this the usual style of books of this type? Do I just not grok it? Am I judging it too harshly by using fiction standards rather than.. whatever the heck this is standards?

I was disappointed. I was hoping for an entertaining and inspiring read like I had with Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood. His style, as I recall, seemed much more straight-forward and readable. Plus, he wrote it himself in first person. Not necessarily better than someone else writing it and/or third person, but it avoids some of the pitfalls I believe Relin fell into.

This book is going back to the library on Monday.