I first read this book when I was 15 or 16 in an AP class and kept a copy because teenaged me thought it was brilliant. My AP teacher, a young man that I think amusingly was about the same age I am now, also thought it was brilliant.

Rereading it now: the narrator is unreliable and the tension between how well he thinks he teaches and the awful way he treats people is fascinating but I had to put the book down when I got to the part where he is hiking in the mountains of Montana with his preteen son in the fall. They charge straight up a steep one and when his kid is tired the first time he doesn’t stop. When his kid is tired the SECOND time he doesn’t stop. When his kid twists an ankle he STILL DOES NOT STOP and makes his kid keep walking because *he* the narrator, is not tired yet. I’m honestly not sure if I can finish the book after that.

I didn’t understand reading it as a kid quite what was going on in this scene. The narrator is just overall incredibly self centered, needs help earlier in the book and doesn’t take it, and just spends most of the book blathering his ideas all over people and then telling us triumphantly about it. It just reads as if the narrator has 0 care for other human beings, which is a strange and interesting contrast to his apparent interest in teaching, which to me must be founded in care and respect. But his methods are neither, the more I think about it. He only cares about knowledge!