Nine books on the very human importance of walking

Katherine May is a New York Times bestselling author, whose titles include Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times and The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of being autistic. Her fiction includes The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club and Burning Out. She is also the editor of The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon.

May lives in Whitstable, UK with her husband, son, three cats and a dog.

Her latest book is The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk In The Wild To Find Her Way Home.

At Lit Hub May tagged nine books on the very human importance of walking, including:

Jay Griffiths, Tristimania

Jay Griffiths’ beautiful prose casts a light on the experience of “tristimania”—a historic term, preferred by Griffiths, for a bipolar episode. Mania, here, is portrayed as a kind of spiralling creativity that is too big, too vigorous, to endure. But healing comes through a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, where she finds a different kind of endurance and also the kindness of strangers. Reading it, I felt like I understood for the first time that we can learn to honor our difficult, uncompromising selves, and that the arduous work of getting there is vital to the process.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue