This book is far more enjoyably read as an occasional essay than as a book to take on start to finish. The main themes are fairly repetitive...walking is a more social form of transportation, it relates better to our evolutionary pace and is thus relaxing, etc. In the end it basically comes down to, we have the modern day comfort of being able to choose to walk, and it is satisfying.

I enjoy walking, but the author's relation to a small part of why we walk (basically for relaxation and social protest) left me thinking there must be more to it by the mid point of the book. Nothing new truly came about after that point either...more of her experiences, more about Paris and San Francisco, and that's it.

For a 'history' or 'analysis' go elsewhere. For a bit of self satisfaction that you make time to be on your feet in the modern world, this can be enjoyable in pieces.

This book is so ~2020~! Like many people, I started going for more walks during the pandemic. Starting in March I started going for a 2-mile walk every day (in the snow), and by the end of August my dad and I were walking 3 2-mile walks per day. Observing life around me during these walks became the most calming parts of my days. It is so refreshing! Now that I'm back at college, I've found I quite enjoy walking my 1.5-mi commute instead of taking the bus or train. There's something so calming about choosing the slowest mode of transportation possible. . . observing life from a perspective of 3 mph.
I've had this book on my TBR for awhile, but after 2020, I knew I should read it soon, because its contents might be more meaningful to me now. Indeed they were. This book covered many different aspects of walking, including: ancient philosophers and their ideas about walking, walking for fun,
urban vs. rural walking environments, the relationship between walking and thinking, and the dangers of walking after dark. This book was such a refreshing nonfiction reading experience. A lot of us walk every day, but how often do we think about the history and the philosophy involved in the act of walking? This was a calming and eye-opening read. I recommend it to anyone who got out for a walk during this pandemic. :~)

Didn't finish.

Wide-ranging. Scholarly. Urgent.

I'd rate this about a 3.5. I really enjoyed reading it, especially as a lot of it aligns with how I think about experiencing places and then translating that into my paintings. If you're going to read this, you just have to do so with a grain of salt because of the way she makes declarations throughout.
It kind of petered out at the end, as I find books of this type - a dive into both history and culture with a personal slant - can do. But I still loved it overall.

This is my rating scale:
5 masterpiece
4 holy crap that's good
3 would recommend to a friend
2 not a complete waste of time
1 eh

It's interesting for me to compare this book with "On Trails," another nonfiction book about walking that I recently finished reading. To some extent, I could make the same criticism of Wanderlust that I did of OT--it attempts a sort of comprehensiveness that I'm not sure it needs to attempt, and I felt like I might have enjoyed it more as a series of articles than as a book. (Again, my completionism as a reader may be somewhat to blame.) But on the other hand, Solnit is a wonderful writer. She has an admirable ability to write about issues of justice relating to seemingly non-political topics (such as walking) without seeming at all preachy. It helps that she writes a lot from personal experiences that were clearly not specifically oriented toward writing a book, but rather just a part of the fabric of her life. I come away from her writing with a very strong feeling that she writes from the heart, though I'm sure in reality this involves a lot of hard work. Her discussions of the class- and gender-related aspects of walking as a pastime are quite compelling, and I learned about several things I didn't know of before, such as Peace Pilgrim. My only complaints would be that, later in the book, she writes rapturously about some performance art that frankly seemed very unengaging to me, and while she takes a critical eye to ideas about the virtue of walking outdoors, she seems totally uncritical of the virtue of walking in the big city; in a way, it seems like she has traded in one type of romanticism for another. But really, she's a great writer and you should read her!