Wanderlust

This book really got to me because it offers a rich and quixotic history of walking that encompasses the Romantics, the French flaneurs, and a host of other wanderers. In her chapter on San Francisco, Solnit re-maps the space of her home city in a way that outlines her own rediscovery and gave me new eyes to see a place that I love.

I love walking and I love history, and so Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking flicks my switch.

In a series of captivating and authoritative essays, Solnit takes us on parades, pilgrimages, and protest marches. We walk with philosophers and romantics, prostitutes, and early hominids, and we see that walking is always a socio-political act. As with all good journeys, the book has something new and exciting around every corner; an alluring view or intriguing perspective.

Solnit is a smart writer, and Wanderlust is a love letter to the art of putting one foot in front of the other.… show more.

Like Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, this book is about what it means to be open to serendipity, to take “subversive detours,” and to travel without a checklist, shopping list, or itinerary. Neither of these are traditional travel books, but instead offer a sense of travel that includes our own backyards and dreamscapes as well as foreign terrain. Solnit is one of the great and one of the most versatile writers of our time, with a roving intelligence that enlivens whatever she looks at, be it medieval maps or downtrodden city streets, and that, finally, is what… show more.