A
new book by Geoff Nicholson has me thinking once again about walking. It’s called
Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps
. If you are a fellow devotee of pedestrianism, you are likely to have read Nicholson’s
The Lost Art of Walking
(2008), which came relatively early in the current vogue for the subject. Not that writing-about-walking has ever been on the verge of extinction or anything close to that, but we’ve seen an explosion of books from every imaginable angle, a trend some date back to Rebecca Solnit’s
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
. Nicholson has written a lot of books, including a shelf full of fiction (
Bleeding London
has to be included on any credible shortlist of “walking novels”), but I think it’s his nonfictional ruminations on this subject that have won for him an unusually wide and faithful readership.