To Shake The Sleeping Self: Jedidiah Jenkins

Rating: 1.5/5

“This was life? Quitting the fight and accepting yourself, flaws and all? I don't want to accept my flaws.”

Today on the blog, we have a guest post by my husband, Max, who was so moved by his hatred for this book, he wrote the following review. Enjoy!!

Like all things that are mostly bad, it will be easier to start this review by highlighting some of the bright spots of this book. They are few and far between.

Jedidiah (who affectionately calls himself a series of nonsense nicknames throughout the book) manages, periodically, to convey what the reader is generally forced to assume is the wonder and awe he encountered on his pilgrimage (I use that word somewhat literally and will return to this later), from Oregon to Patagonia, on bike. Witnessing firsthand the enormous migration of monarch butterflies in Mexico, paddle-boarding by crocodiles by the mouth of a river in a desolate beach town under lock-down from the cartel, or being handed a bag of warm donuts from a kind farmer on horseback in Patagonia... these are the moments of the book that matter. These are moments that are tender and seemingly insignificant, but carry the most weight.

Unfortunately, these moments are fleeting, and even when they arrive, Jed seems to only partially grasp their significance. These missed opportunities should be the crux of the book: a spiritual and natural awakening for the author, which is the purpose of the whole trip. Jed, though, is too preoccupied with recounting his struggles as a gay, Christian man, of white privilege. These are fine topics for a book, but here they dominate the work to the point where it is easy to forget Jed is even traveling on bike. None of the exploration I hoped for was here. Jed and his friends spend most of their time in hostels instead of camping, and there is virtually no mention of the details of his route, other than the hipster old-world maps he seems obsessed with drawing. Of course, he qualifies all of this by saying it is "my trip... no one else's."

It becomes clear, about halfway through the memoir, that this is not a travelogue or road-story; it is a religious expose of oneself, masquerading as an adventure story. Again, this isn't to knock these topics or Jed's noble self-exploration, but the book will not appeal to those not deeply interested in adventure themes - it has been intentionally and falsely marketed as something it is definitely not.

“The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life.”

Beyond these major thematic issues, there is Jed's writing style. At many points I wondered if someone else wrote this narrative based on his journal notes. The prose is dry and awkward. Infuriatingly, Jed also relies heavily on concluding his sentences with cutesy phrasings, like "Ugh." and "Damn..." which detracts from the (infrequent) earnestness of the book. It is like he does not trust himself to finish a thought. By the end it was clear that writing this was not a labor of love or even an extension of his exercise of spiritual exploration; it was something his manager and editors said he should do to augment his Instagram success. Because of this, the writing feels rushed, insincere, and misses its own point. I found myself drawing conclusions for Jed that I hoped he'd elaborate on, but they never came. Instead, we hear about his countless moments around some fire drinking "craft beer," something he mentions at least 10 times throughout the book, resenting his friend for buying and smoking weed, and his nagging self-doubt as a Christian.

This narrative becomes cloying very quickly - Jed is clearly checking off boxes. The end result is a disjointed work that doesn't spend enough time on any one topics to feel significant, and doesn't connect the dots. If Jed truly aspires to be a writer, and a travel writer at that, he needs to spend more time on the mundane, the minutia of the road, to find the profound significance he is searching for.

What had a lot of promise based on its description, is unfortunately an overly-manufactured piece of self-deprecating hipster ephemera.

- M.S.