Clara’s Verdict
Kate Humble’s Thinking on My Feet arrived in my queue at exactly the right moment — one of those periods when everything felt slightly too pressured and the idea of spending eight and a half hours walking through someone else’s relationship with the outdoors sounded like precisely the right medicine. Humble narrates her own journal of walks through the seasons, and the effect is immediate and persuasive: this is a book that makes you want to put your shoes on before the first chapter is out. With 864 ratings and a score of 4.4, it’s clearly found an audience well beyond my particular moment of need.
About the Audiobook
The book is structured around the seasons, with Humble tracking her walks and their effects — on her mood, her thinking, her relationships with the land and the people she encounters — through a year. It’s part personal essay, part nature writing, part gentle argument that walking is not an optional extra but a fundamental human need, one that our increasingly sedentary lives have quietly removed without most of us noticing the cost.
Alongside Humble’s own observations, there are accounts of walks with others who have discovered the same thing in different ways: an artist who walks to find inspiration, a man who takes people battling addiction into the mountains, a woman who walked every footpath in Wales — three thousand seven hundred miles of them — after a cancer diagnosis. These interspersed stories prevent the book from becoming merely a personal diary and give it a wider, more persuasive frame. The underlying argument — that self-propelled movement through the world stimulates thought, resolves problems, and restores something that indoor life takes away — is made quietly and cumulatively rather than polemically, which is why it works.
Published by Aster, released October 2018, and apparently as relevant now as it was then.
There is a strand running through the book that is worth drawing out explicitly: the relationship between walking and mental health. Humble doesn’t present this as a cure or a treatment programme, but the cumulative evidence she assembles — from her own experience and from the people she walks with — makes a quiet, persuasive case that physical movement through the world has an effect on psychological state that sedentary activity simply doesn’t replicate. This was published in 2018, before the pandemic made outdoor exercise a lifeline for millions, and it reads now as prescient in ways the author couldn’t have anticipated.
The Narration
Humble narrates her own book, and this is entirely the right decision. Her television presence translates well to audio: warm, unhurried, grounded. She reads with the ease of someone who has spent years speaking to camera, but without the slightly artificial quality that television training sometimes introduces. The seasonal structure gives the narration a natural rhythm that suits the material, and her delivery of the other people’s stories — the artist, the addiction counsellor, the Welsh walker — is generous and unsentimental. She doesn’t perform these accounts so much as witness them, which is exactly the right register.
Humble is also honest about the conditions under which walking sometimes fails to deliver: the walks taken in too much of a rush, the days when the weather defeats you, the stretches of countryside that are beautiful in theory and miserable in practice. This honesty prevents the book from becoming evangelical, and it makes the many passages where walking does deliver — clarity, resolution, unexpected joy — feel genuinely earned.
What Readers Say
Thinking on My Feet holds a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from 864 listeners — a substantial sample that gives real weight to the score. Mr M J Pedley wrote that the book « came along just when I was in need of some emotional support » and that it prompted him to start walking to manage his anxiety. Kez described it as « a great book to walk in my mind through the words of Kate » when physically unable to get outside. Richard G praised the simplicity of its central message. BJB loved it enough to buy a second copy for her daughter. The most detailed positive review, from Joanna van der Hoeven, also addressed a cluster of negative reviews that had apparently accused Humble of hypocrisy over travel — she dismissed these as misreading the book, and her description suggests they were right to do so.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone who has ever wanted to walk more and hasn’t quite managed it, or who walks already but hasn’t thought carefully about why it helps. It’s a particularly good choice for people experiencing stress, anxiety, or creative stagnation — the book functions almost as a gentle prescription. It would also suit fans of Robert Macfarlane’s work, or anyone who loved Wild by Cheryl Strayed but prefers something less dramatic and more quotidian in its pleasures.
Start listening to Thinking on My Feet on Audible UK — find it here and go for a walk while you listen.
