Walking and reading — a solitary pursuit

As a life­long intro­vert, two of my favorite pas­times have been walk­ing and reading.

And they’re things I’ve often enjoyed together.

When I was a child, my grand­fa­ther gave me an old mil­i­tary shoul­der bag that I car­ried dur­ing soli­tary adven­tures in the woods and mead­ows around our home on Irvine Road. I’d fill it with food and food for thought, includ­ing William O. Steele’s Westerns for boys and a well-worn biog­ra­phy of my child­hood hero, Daniel Boone — who, although he was unlet­tered, knew some­thing about long walks and liked to read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

In near­ly four decades as a news­pa­per reporter and edi­tor, I hiked Berea’s Pinnacles and took along poems by Wendell Berry or James Still to read on rocky out­crops, read from the Book of Common Prayer while over­look­ing the Kentucky River at Raven Run, explored the writ­ings of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal while wan­der­ing the woods around the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, and end­ed almost day by walk­ing along the lakes and sun­flower fields of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, then read­ing until sunset.

Now I’m afraid my hik­ing days may be over. Since turn­ing 60, I have suf­fered pain in my low­er back, hips and knees, and for months have been trou­bled by plan­tar fasci­itis. I’ve gained weight and lost mus­cle tone, and I dis­cov­ered today that I’m pre-diabetic.

But I can still read, and I espe­cial­ly like to read sto­ries about walking.

Among those I’ve enjoyed in recent years that I high­ly rec­om­mend are The Marches by Rory Stewart, A Pilgrimage to Eternity by Timothy Egan and one I read this spring, American Ramble, by Neil King Jr.

In The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland, Stewart, a British politi­cian who served in Iraq, describes walk­ing the length of Hadrian’s Wall with his 89-year-old father, his own 400-mile jour­ney through the dis­put­ed Middleland between England and Scotland, with reflec­tions on the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries, and his thoughts on the end of his father’s life.

In A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, Egan, a colum­nist for The New York Times and a pro­lif­ic author, writes about his 1,000-mile spir­i­tu­al jour­ney on the Via Francigena, once a medieval trail for seek­ers through France and the Alps to St. Peter’s Square, and of his strug­gle with the death of his moth­er and his family’s com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry with the Catholic Church.

In American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal, King, a polit­i­cal reporter for The Wall Street Journal, takes us with him on his walk from his home in Washington, D.C., to New York’s Central Park in the spring of 2021 after his can­cer diagnosis.

Determined to redis­cov­er what mat­ters after a fraught elec­tion and a glob­al epi­dem­ic that brought nor­mal life to a stand­still, King takes us along as he ram­bles through America’s his­to­ry, past Valley Forge and New York Harbor, his­toric bat­tle­fields and ceme­ter­ies, and Amish and Quaker farms, get­ting to know the peo­ple and try­ing to get past their polit­i­cal divisions.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing account of per­son­al and nation­al renewal.

As I’ve done every year for more than a decade, I’ve includ­ed a list of the books I’ve read in the past 12 months. Here are those for 2023:

Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism – 1976–2009  – Neal Gabler

The Paris Correspondent – Alan S. Cowell

Surrender: Forty Songs, One Story – Bono

Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times – Otis Moss III

The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama – Gabriel Debenedetti

The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People – Neil Hegarty

Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep – Tish Harrison Warren

The Waste Land and Other Poems – T.S. Eliot

Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square – Bill Haslam

Our Fathers – Andrew O’Hagan

Here is New York – E.B. White

The Storyteller – Dave Grohl

Front Row at the Trump Show – Jonathan Karl

The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017–2021 – Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Trackers – Charles Frazier

American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal – Neil King Jr.

Lark Ascending – Silas House

America America – Ethan Canin

Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song – Steve Turner

Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer – Rowan Williams

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism – Timothy Keller

Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation – Collin Hansen

Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency – Mark Updegrove

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America – Maggie Haberman

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post – Martin Baron

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect – Bill Kovich and Tom Rosentiel

Is Christmas Unbelievable? – Rebecca McLaughlin