This month involved a trip to London curated by a local museum that I have been looking forward to for almost a year. I was able to look at some amazing, beautiful, very old books. However, my actual reading was minimal. Next month’s list will be incredibly long as I am about halfway through five books, all either begun before I left or started on planes and trains before I fell asleep or chose to look out the window instead.

I did bring (and finish) one book that was a perfect fit for my adventure: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin. It was an excellent choice for a woman traveling by herself for the first time in four years. Elkin wants to remind her readers women have always been pushing boundaries, living individual lives, and leaving their homes and domestic spheres to explore their cities. It’s a wonderful mix of philosophy, biography, and memoir. Everyone who has ever felt (or wondered about) the power of a long walk should read this.

Otherwise, most of my month was filled with (you guessed it!) long walks through London listening to the city, plenty of music (the new album by the Rolling Stones was a particular focus), re-watching movies on the plane (Paddington will always be the perfect plane film and I will debate that forever), and catching up on some past issues of magazines that have been sitting on my kitchen table for too long (Daniel Trilling’s Diary titled “Citizenship Restored” for the Sept 21^st, 2023 London Review of Books was particularly of note). [1]

Now I am home, the wanderer in me is satiated for a bit, and winter has set in. The reading I put aside in October will take full focus in November. Spoiler alert: there will be witches and vampires just in case any of you are reluctant to leave Halloween behind.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/daniel-trilling/diary