In A Tramp’s Wallet, Sam Pickering spends six months roaming Australia and New Zealand, tramping landscapes pocked by sheep stations, art galleries and bakeries, and always libraries, their dusty shelves troves quick with life and literature. The saunterings of one of America’s best and most popular essayists stretch the seams of A Tramp’s Wallet. Far from the hoes and saws that prune days into convention, life flourishes, and this book is weedy and rankly rich with thought and description. “Lord,” St. Odo of Cluny said on his deathbed, “I have loved the beauty of thy house.” Pickering records his love of that house, and, if truth must out, his love for a few neglected out buildings—barns and backhouses, even the ramshackled huts of thought.