What are some great books about walking?
I'm looking for books about characters walking, preferably without a clear motive or direction, in an urban environment, but anything goes as long as it's focused on walking. I made the same thread a few weeks ago and someone told me to read The New York Trilogy, I liked City of Glass but disliked Ghosts and The Locked Room. Walking is really important in Dostoyevsky and Joyce works isn't it?
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Bump I guess
I dunno but I can tell you that walking is great to get the creative juices flowing
All kinds of intellectuals, such as Darwin, would take long and satisfying walks
searching for cacciato
It is in crime and punishment. Return to Tsuguru by Osamu Dazai is my recommendation. Or the film Stalker by Tarkovsky (and not the book it was based on which is meh)
Crime and Punishment is basically the protagonist walking and having bad dreams.
Cortázar wrote some shit on walking upstairs
LOTR
Are there any books that have long segments going back and forth describing the mundane events around the central character and their wandering thoughts on other things?
Well, there's Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life by Tomas Espedal. It's half memoir about Espedals views on walking and half essay about famous historical figures and their views on moving your feet, people like Rousseau, Kant, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Whitman, Giacometti, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Not necessarily walking, but close enough.
"The Walk" by Robert Walser
"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf.
Actually, any book with that "flow of consciousness" writing style
stream of consciousness*
Ulysses by Joyce is a book about two dudes walking. You get into their minds while they walk, talk, piss, and think. Its a tough, academic read.
I'll just say Open City like I do every time you have this thread. Austerlitz has maybe a bit of what you're after and a very discursive and impressionistic style even when they aren't physically walking around.
Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog.
A nice short read. Would highly recommend.
"The Long Walk" by Stephen King
his best work imo.
Read the Flaneur essay by Baudelaire.
Hunger by Hamsun
The Quentin sections of The Sound and the Fury involve Quentin just walking around town observing things and musing on his troubled associations. Would definitely recommend.
Tokyo Blues by Murakami
Meme
These are good recommendations.
This is amazing and most on point. Walser, as well as Sebald, features lots of walking in his works.
For my part, check out The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke.
Dickens was a bipolar insomniac with boundless energy, frequently engaging in 20 miles of walking a day. He wrote about his walks and most notably his walks in London at night due to sleeplessness and I believe these fascinating works have been compiled into a modern volume called Night Walks, which I would be eager to read.
Gehen - Thomas Berhard