I also voted for The Last Great Walk, and like the idea of reading Follow the River. Meanwhile, I cracked the code of where EW has found our books: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/may/best-long-walks-books.html. This looks like a better list for our purpose, in my view: https://redaroundtheworld.com/2019/12/23/best-books-about-walking-long-distances-around-world/. Books of particular interest from this list (I skipped ones about walking the Appalachian or Pacific Trails), for future consideration, are: Caroline Van Hemert, The Sun is a Compass (an ornithologist and her husband journey from Pacific Rainforest to Alaskan Arctic, all human-powered including walking) Rory Stewart, The Places In Between (walk across Afghanistan in 2001) Helen Thayer, Walking the Gobi Levison Wood, Walking the Nile (and other books by same author walking in the Americas, Amazon, Arabia, and Himalayas) Other books on my "wish list" I've come across from other lists or reviews are: Simon Armitage, Walking Home (a poet's walk across northern England while giving poetry readings at night) Teju Cole, Open City (memoirish novel about a mixed-race immigrant's walks around Manhattan while thinking about his life) Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (famed author's 350-mile trek through Liberia in 1935) Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders (author and friend biked the Silk Road, Turkey to China via the 'Stans, around 2010) William Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows (the author, who taught at NYU, walked every block in NYC) Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Fearful Void (walk across the Sahara in the early '70's) Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ("one of the greatest travel classics" of a trip taken in 1956) Bernard Ollivier, Out of Istanbul (first volume by retired French journalist who walked the Silk Road in three segments in the early 2000's) Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (NOT THE STEPHEN KING BOOK -- memoir by Polish POW who with six others escaped from a Soviet camp in 1941 and walked all the way to British India and freedom; subject of a Peter Weir movie) Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a History of Walking Of these, I have previously read and can vouch for the Cole, Harris, Moorhouse, Ollivier, and Rawicz books. (Although the Harris book involves biking rather than walking, I can promise you'll love it).

Posted by Nate Spiller at 2021-05-07 20:47:56 UTC