Just thought of another “walking” book!   The Lighthouse by Alison Moore – read in February of this year.   Oh my –  that book has another male protagonist taking off on a foot-tour, this time in Germany.  He planned the trip,  but he’s woefully unprepared.  This one is more like “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” in that the protagonist lives in his head quite a lot of the time,  going back through his sorrowful life.  The two protagonists here had similarly unhappy childhoods.  This was not so much the case in        “Wild”  or “The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared,”  and irrelevant in “The Year of the Hare.”

Moore’s book is well written,  the equal of Joyce’s, but rather over-done with the symbolism and not in the least bit funny.    The hero is not so sympathetic for some reason and the characters he meets are even less so.