"New York In Stride: An Insider's Walking Guide" by Jessie Kanelos Weiner & Jacob Lehman

I've just taken an amazing walking tour of New York City . . . in book form! 

We bought this NYC guidebook a while back (I see the publication date was February 2020, so we must have bought it since then; did we buy it for our pandemic-thwarted plans for a grand NYC birthday celebration for Sam that year? Or, we did go back to NYC in 2023, so maybe we bought this book for that trip?). I don't think I'd ever gotten around to reading it before (although I did read--and love!--its sister book about Paris), and at first I thought Sam must have read it (or at least skimmed it), because I remember walking to several of its entries (many of them book-related! Corner Bookstore, Three Lives & Co, The Strand, etc); but digging further into my external memory banks, I see that we went to those shops in 2015 and 2017, so it couldn't have been because they were suggested in this book.

I'm still working on getting rid of belongings that we don't need or love. I came across New York in Stride and Paris in Stride hidden in a basket in our bedroom. My first thought was to get rid of them. While it's relatively likely that we'll end up in NYC again someday, I'm not sure we'll ever make it to Paris again; and if we do, will these books be hopelessly out of date by then? But while I have proof that I've read the Paris one, I had no memory or proof of reading the NYC one, so I figured I ought to do that before getting rid of it. Now that I've read it . . . I'm not sure I can let go of it. It's just too cute, and it was a lot of fun to read. And if I'm going to keep it, I might as well keep the Paris one that matches so well! 

The completist hodophile in me is super tempted to plan a two week trip to NYC just so that I can go on every single walking tour in this book. My realist side says that I saved myself a small fortune by going on this trip in my imagination for the low price of $16.26. (Funny that it didn't cross my mind once while reading NYC that they should have included distances, whereas that was my main complaint about the Paris book. Pretty sure the difference is that I was reading the Paris book before an actual trip to Paris.)

OMG they've done London too. (Hang on while I Add To Cart.) Too bad that it's two years too late for me. Will I ever go back to London? Well, if I do, I'll be ready.