Rebecca Solnit's Books

I’m a huge fan of Rebecca Solnit, having listened to or read eight of her books, mainly on Audible, where she does a fine job of narrating several of them. She’s a prolific nonfiction writer and activist who delves into the core of existence and life on earth, whether the subject is walking, wandering, getting lost, art, nature, living in the moment, or living in memory.

She understands and explores place as well as any writer I’ve read. She has put together three atlases (I don’t know how; the research seems crushing), including Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, which I bought and waded through, fascinated by her charting and deep knowledge of the city. Like San Francisco itself, Infinite City is unique, stunningly creative, and a beautiful world all its own.

I met Ms. Solnit, sort of, on a Zoom call with the Orwell Society. She was the featured speaker, invited to discuss her book Orwell’s Roses, which I’ve enjoyed several times. Solnit was incredibly knowledgeable about Orwell’s story, which has been told many times, but she came at Orwell from a fascinating angle. She intertwined his life with his passion for the natural world and gardening, including the roses he bought at Woolworth’s and planted in the 1930s, which appear to still be blooming in the yard of a house he rented. If you read Orwell’s Diaries, you’ll see how plants, animals, and the earth were a passion and part of his daily existence.

I wrote a historical fiction piece titled “Inside Orwell” that tells the story of how Orwell became Orwell. It uses his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a framework, interspersed with his years at Eton, his service as a policeman in Burma, shooting an elephant, tramping with the poor, starving in Paris, and other adventures that were part of his evolution from Eric Blair to George Orwell.

Solnit explores many of the same topics, but her unique approach made her book special and illuminating. She integrates his love of nature into his life as he wrote about, and did what he could to fight against, imperialism, fascism, and totalitarianism, a fight that nearly killed him.

To give you a sense of her work, here are a few brief observations on the Solnit books I’ve read:

The Faraway Nearby explores how we’re connected to our own lives and to others through the stories we discover, experience, and journey through.

Men Explain Things to Me would be hilarious if it weren’t so insulting and ubiquitous. Women in particular (though not exclusively) have to put up with that guy who believes he knows what he’s talking about and that women don’t, even when a woman is far better informed and educated about the subject. This book is even more relevant today in the insulting Trump–Vance world of misogyny and ignorance.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost explores the passage we all take into the unknown: how we lose ourselves, and how we can discover new parts of the world and ourselves.

Recollections of My Nonexistence is Solnit’s memoir, which delves into her origins and the challenges of becoming a prolific writer, historian, and feminist.

Solnit is a writer worth following on social media, as well as in The Guardian and other publications where her journalism appears.

Rebecca Solnit’s books include:

Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Hope in the Dark; Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
The Faraway Nearby
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Orwell’s Roses
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Men Explain Things to Me
A Book of Migrations
Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era.
Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers.
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas
Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
The Mother of All Questions
Inside Out: Art by Stefan Kurten & Essay by Rebecca Solnit
Cinderella Liberator
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

Audiobooks:

Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Hope in the Dark; Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
The Faraway Nearby
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Orwell’s Roses
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Men Explain Things to Me
A Book of Migrations

Rebecca Solnit Quotes:

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss. ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.” ― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.” ― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“Books are solitudes in which we meet.” ― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
“Home is everything you can walk to.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
“What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?” ― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
“We die all the time to avoid being killed.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir