Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

This is a book about wandering women, the author included, who build relationships with their cities by walking through them. Anyone who has taken a stroll down a city street knows how visceral the experience can be (as long as you're paying attention), but this is uniquely true for women, who have never had the advantage of a covert relationship with their city sidewalks. Unlike men, women are singularly visible, whether they were breaking norms of yesteryear by drifting without a chaperone, or are clipping around New York in modern-day heels. Women can and do make feminist statements simply by strolling through their stomping grounds; Elkin creates an interesting and inarguable case for this. She, too, is a wanderer and provides compelling anecdotes about her own journeys, interspersed with those of literary heavy-hitters George Sand, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and others.