Welcome to Litsy!

A difficult book to review. It‘s part history, philosophy, religious study, sociology, memoir, literary study…it meanders (appropriately so) through how we walk to why we walk to where we walk. It‘s fascinating but slow going (again, appropriately so). It touches on some of Solnit‘s more recent writing but is very different. I would recommend this book, but reservedly. The section near the end, about Las Vegas, is startlingly out of (cont)

A boys‘ book? I mean, sure, there is a grand total of one female character and she appears in just a handful of pages (Jim‘s mother). Still, let‘s ditch the “boys‘ books and girls‘ books” already.

I fell down a rabbit hole about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that still exists (after a fashion), working for justice for the desaparecidos of the Guerra Sucia. Three of the original founders, two French nuns who helped them, and seven other helpers were kidnapped, drugged, and thrown unconscious from aircraft into the South Atlantic (a practice known as death flight). Yet the Mothers, and the Grandmothers, marched on. (cont)

Today‘s goals: finish the tagged (75 pages to go) and start catching up on Middlemarch (a week behind for #PemberLittens!). I couldn‘t focus on MM and Vanity Fair at the same time so I paused the former to finish the latter last week. Kiddo‘s had a cold (or cold- or flu-like symptoms) since Thursday so I‘ve had less reading time than usual. Hoping to accomplish at least one of these goals today! 🤞🏻

My reading buddy today is appropriate since this book is a history of walking and he is also my walking buddy!

I love this - I walk and read, but now I‘m thinking of walking and reading aloud. A whole new set of possibilities! Although on my usual through the city route it might raise some eyebrows! #bookishproblems #bfc

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/25/walking-helped-me-discover-the-slo...

This week @wanderinglynn invited us to share our favourite exercise equipment - this is mine!

They‘re low maintenance, always with me and help not only my body but my mind. I process, think and create whilst I walk (and of course read!). Walking definitely does positive things to my brain (and my butt!). #bfc
What‘s your exercise equipment.....?

@chrissyreadit @erinsuegreads @itchyfeetreader @microbemom @phatsallylee @blaire @sudi

#QuotsyJuly19 Day 19: #Epiphany
View of my teenage daughter (and my brother-in-law) while having breakfast today. Camping at Coloma.

Sometimes, I struggle to think of something for a challenge prompt, and have to do a bit of googling, and sometimes, this comes up with books I‘ve never heard of that I think look really interesting. Like this one, on walking.

#Wanderlust #LetsTravelJuly
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks
@OriginalCyn620

Accidentally got a sunburn while flanuering after finishing this today. Oops.

"Such a density of literature had accumulated in Paris... that one pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly... Parisian writers always gave the street address of their characters, as though all readers knew Paris so well that only a real location would breathe life into a character, as though histories and stories themselves had taken up residence throughout the city." That is why I love stories set in Paris.

This book became too philosophical for me. Not what I was looking for.

#QuotsySept18 Day 8: When a #Trek is more than what it seems when construed from a male gaze. Walking as a performative art.

A collection of essays about walking and how walking can be an antidote for our speeded-up era in which everything needs to be done in a nanosecond. Taking a walk gives us time to kick back and enjoy life and gives us time to really think about things.

I‘ve been reading Rebecca Solnit‘s history of walking and it inspired me to take a long walk on this sunny day🚶🏻‍♀️

Looking forward to this next reading stack. 🤓

"Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world."

Did some used book shopping this weekend. Where do I start?

1. I'm not sure. I think it was probably a book of fairy tales
2. Ireland with England a super close second
3. I need to see Scotland and the Orkneys and Northern Ireland and Scandinavia. They all kind of fit together
4. Fly to get there and drive around while there
5. depends on my mood. Both are yummy.
#manicmonday @JoScho

1. Umm...not sure. I‘ve been traveling for years! But Under the Tuscan Sun made me want to visit Tuscany.
2. So many! Vietnam, Tuscany, New Zealand, Kenya, Nevis, and Australia come to mind first.
3. Keep traveling to new places! 🌏 ✈️
4. ✈️ ✈️✈️
5. Gelato!! The real, Italian kind.

#ManicMonday

Equal parts fascinating and dull! The parts that were interesting we're wonderful but there was a lot of areas in between that word seriously boring LOL. I decided to read this book for two reasons one, I have enjoyed a lifelong love of walking and Hiking! Too, because an author I follow said he was reading it and it sounded interesting but to his credit he did warn me that it could be a little tedious 😉

This book is very interesting and, as typical for Rebecca Solnit, really got me to think about walking from a totally new and different perspective. However, it is complicated and not the book for me right now.

Exploring the world is the best way of exploring the mind... (I loved visiting Portugal.)

I have loved everything I have read by Rebecca Solnit. I am going to learn what she has to say about "WALKING".

In 1895 a young working class New Yorker named Lizzie Schafer was arrested as a prostitute because she was out alone after dark and had stopped to ask directions of two men...Only after a medical examination proved she was a "good girl" was she released. Had she not been a virgin, she might well have been found guilty of a crime compounded of the twin acts of having been sexual and of walking alone in the evening.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time...that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular...are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite…I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about 3 miles an hour. If so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

@Grrlbrarian I will play your game: when I'm not reading, I'm... walking and listening to audiobooks. It's my last full day in Vancouver and the weather is perfect.

Visited one of my favorite used bookstores and did a little damage. I was able to find Wanderlust and Matterhorn there, I've been wanting to read these for ages!

A few of my #booksaboutnature #readjanuary

I picked this up at a used bookstore while traveling in Oregon because "Often as I walk I think." The only problem is how much wanderlust it gives me. Stupid desk job, getting in the way of my best life. #Adulting

Finished my 24 hours with minutes to spare! All these sampled or finished, plus 1 1/2 audiobooks... #readathon #24in48

#tbt to the time I was reading this in an airport and a woman who looked suspiciously like Rebecca Solnit noticed me and smiled. But I'll never know for sure. I loved this book.

Oh, and look -- my husband gave me back a whole stack of walking books today!

Waking up two hours early is worth it when you have a good book and a large cup of coffee.