Author
Craig Mod
Published
2023
First read
October 2024
Walk these small back roads, do so for kilometer after kilometer, day after day, look closely and closer still, and you might pick up on the people and patters of a general area. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’ll “know” or “understand” it, but I would say that walking — and walking slowly and deliberately — is probably the first step to familiarizing yourself with a place.
I’m unsure why I held on to this for almost a year before reading it. Typically I read near everything that Craig writes as he publishes it. Don’t perceive a lack of quality on the book’s part in a delay on my part.
This is the fine art edition of what will also be a longer, mass market book due out in May 2025. The fine art edition is sold out but go pre-order the trade hardcover!
As good as the writing is (crisp, thoughtful) and as beautiful as the photos are (rich, given space to breath) it’s the container (and, I think, Craig’s obsessiveness with every detail) that I’m drawn back to. The book is simply so comfortable to hold, open, and read that nothing gets in the way of absorbing the stories from along the hundreds of miles of walking. I read it in one sitting.
He didn’t know how to slot my past into a socioeconomic hierarchy, had never before met someone from my station in the world. His gaze was new and in that newness I felt that I, too, could be something else.
