The books I would put in a friend's pack: walking as a way of thinking, the mountain shelf, journeys on foot, and the practical guides for the trail.
A note before the books. Where a title is linked, the link goes to an independent bookshop, and some of these links may earn Orophile Edit a small share if you buy there. No publisher or bookshop chose these titles, and none paid to be here.
Most of what this journal argues was learned on foot. The notebook I carry on a walk holds two or three lines a day, and the thinking happens between them. Books do a different job. They are what I read the night before, or on the train home, to understand why the walk worked. These are the ones I would put in a friend's pack.
Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (translated by John Howe). I first heard this book in Turkish, and it named something I had been writing around for years: the walking philosophers were not taking breaks from thought. Gros follows Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Thoreau and Nerval out of doors and shows what the road gave each of them.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. The wider history: pilgrims, city walkers, protest marches, mountaineers. Useful when you want to know that the slow way has always had company.
Erling Kagge, Walking: One Step at a Time (translated by Becky L. Crook). A Norwegian explorer on the ordinary walk. Short enough to finish in an evening, which is part of its point.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain. Written in the 1940s about the Cairngorms and left in a drawer for three decades. Shepherd went into the mountain rather than up it, and the book reads like a field note that never ends. If this journal has a patron text, it is this one.
Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind. How the high country went from a place people feared to a place they sought out. It explains a good deal about why the summit became a deliverable, and why that is a recent habit.
Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains (translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre). A novel of two friends and one valley in the Italian Alps. The mountain here is a relationship, not a view.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts. In 1933, at eighteen, he set out to walk from the Hook of Holland towards Constantinople. This is the first leg. And if you are going to the Peloponnese, his Mani belongs in the bag for the drive south from Mystras.
Bernard Ollivier, Out of Istanbul (translated by Dan Golembeski). A French journalist who, after retiring, walked the Silk Road starting from my own city. A second chapter written in footsteps.
Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice. Munich to Paris, on foot, in the winter of 1974, because a friend was ill and he believed walking to her would help. The strangest and most honest book on this list.
Gillian Price, Alta Via 1: Trekking in the Dolomites (Cicerone). The practical book for the Dolomites: stages, huts, and a map booklet at 1:25,000. Read it at home so you can leave it in the pack on the trail.
Kate Clow, The Lycian Way. The guide to Turkey's first long-distance walking route, by the woman who waymarked it.
Shane O'Mara, In Praise of Walking. A neuroscientist on what walking does to attention and mood. Read it as this journal reads everything: for what the evidence supports, not for promises about how long anyone will live.
Thoreau's own essay, Walking, is free in any public-domain library, and it still starts the conversation better than most books that followed it.