Wanderlust: a history of walking, Rebecca Solnit

This book by the Californian writer and feminist, Rebecca Solnit, appears in all the bibliographies on the subject of walking. Its dense, cultivated prose offers a compendium of knowledge that ranges from philosophy to history, politics to art history, and poetry to mountaineering, all of which suggest that the value of walking lies fundamentally in its slowness:“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it”.

Rebecca Solnit
Wanderlust: a history of walking
London: Granta Books, 2014
ISBN: 9781783780396
English-language Edition
326 pages