100 books like A Philosophy of Walking

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.

Engaging with this book, I recognized how fear of imperfection often held me back, not just in my art but in various aspects of life. I feel like the importance of showing up and being seen, even when there are no guarantees, is a reminder that I can continue to revisit time and time again.

This book has empowered me to approach my art practice with a heart open to risks and imperfections, which transforms not just the art I produce, but also how I lead, love, and connect with the world around me.

This book charts a series of journeys along ancient tracks, holloways, and drove-roads. I found it a hugely immersive, surprisingly exhilarating read – I loved how Macfarlane brought a very detailed, lucid, and embodied mode of narration to travels that were often unexpected and strange.

As he walks, we hear stories of ghosts, pilgrims, songs, and their singers – it’s a book about people as much as places, and as I read, I gained a powerful sense of how, as humans, we’re shaped, made, and remade, by the landscapes we move through.

Why do women feel like we need to invite everyone to every party, throw weddings that are closer to our parents’ style than our own, and show up to networking nights that we know we won’t get anything out of?

I know this book is meant to be about hosting gatherings, but I’ve applied the principles to nearly everything I do in work and hobbies to add more intention, impact, and fulfillment. I’ve changed the way I sit at restaurants to encourage deeper conversations with friends. I’ve started to purposefully not invite certain people to certain parties since I know it would change the dynamic negatively for others. I’ve embraced the idea of “pop-up rules” at every event I host and expect guests to follow them so that the event is transformative and not boring.

Since reading Priya’s incredible framework, I’ve led extremely successful monthly events for my community, started… show more.

I truly believe that video games are the art form that defines our present and, at least, our near-ish future. So, it was a great pleasure to encounter Zevin’s novel about the relationships behind a video game studio’s origins, which both elevates and scrutinizes the medium’s potential to revolutionize narrative storytelling.

Zevin deftly translates gaming's embodied perspective, including one stand-out moment in the back half that is perhaps the book’s defining triumph. Through her expansive prose, Sam, Sadie, and Marx play out their lives: their moments of intense and sometimes myopic creativity, their intricate interpersonal joys and devastations, and the fantastically rendered worlds, some built from reality and others from pixels which bring them together, push them apart, and might just bring them together again.

How can travel help us find the good life? The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.

This entertaining book treats travellers who were also liars - people who went abroad, but ‘embellished’ their journeys on returning home. It includes the tale of John Byron “Foul-Weather Jack”, who circumnavigated the globe and reported meeting nine-foot giants in 1776 Argentina. In the 1690s, traveller Louis Hennepin’s lies dramatically altered the topography of New Mexico, introducing false rivers and land masses that appeared on maps for 250 years. In the 1560s, sailor David Ingram claimed to have trekked America—describing giant cities, ruby-adorned kings, and rivers flowing the wrong way. Adams thoughtfully reflects on why these travellers lied, and why people at home believed them. The answers lie in the goods and powers associated with travel: prestige, fame, money, and the difficulty of assessing claims about the faraway.

Spinsters Abroad set out to celebrate Victorian women traveller such as Mary Kingsley, Amelia Edwards, and Isabella Bird. However, Birkett quickly discovered that these women were not straightforward role models. Yes, they travelled Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, braving hardship, and making all kinds of discoveries along the way. But it turns out, they managed that because their whiteness trumped their gender. Spinsters Abroad reveals the complexity of these women’s travels, and their lives and worlds. It reflects on their motivations for travel, as well as how Victorians conceived gender and race. The book is also jam-packed with anecdotes. Here is Edwards complaining about flies interrupting her watercolour painting of Egyptian ruins: ‘Nothing disagrees with them; nothing poisons them - not even olive-green’.

Travel writer Parker’s obsession with maps glows through every page. This comical, easy-to-read book celebrates maps by enquiring into their history, and the rich ideas in their makeup. It considers the political power of maps: the placement of borders matters, as does topography in wartime. It also considers the relationship between maps and sex, illustrated by English place names such as ‘Balls Hill’ and ‘Aunt Mary’s Bottom’. Map Addict offers many amusing cartographic tales, recounting the military origins of the Ordnance Survey. And how Phyllis Pearsall came up with the idea for the London A-Z one night in 1935, after getting lost and soaked on her way home from a party.

Rick Rubin is the prototype for my perfect man. Since I have a huge crush on his brain and voice (I could listen to him have a conversation all day), it is no surprise that I love his book outlining the creative process. It feels like it was channeled.

I use it as a daily reader, selecting a page for the day to contemplate during my morning meditation. I love the bite-sized wisdom, which feels like I could have thought of or written it myself—universal truth nuggets.