It began seven years ago in the hamlet of Ferreira in northern Spain. It was the sixth day of a long-distance walk and my feet had become increasingly sore. I sat outside the hostel, my feet up on a chair, feeling utterly dispirited.

“I’ll read to you,” said Anthony, my long-distance walking companion. “That’ll fix you up.”

I was too tired to protest. Anthony hadn’t read aloud to me before – well, not more than a paragraph or two, which I’d always felt as an imposition. I was too impatient for the slow pace of reading aloud.

He pulled out his phone and started reading Salman Rushdie’s Anton Joseph. Rushdie’s memoir of the fatwa, the years of separation, hiding, boredom and danger, was the only book he had downloaded before we left. I listened at first with the usual impatience – it’s so much faster to read silently on the page – but after several minutes, I suddenly noticed the flatness had lifted. My feet were still sore, but I could feel my energy and resilience return. I was ready to go on.

How to eat spaghetti … and other things Margaret Fulton taught Australia Read more

Every afternoon after walking from then on, Anthony read Anton Joseph aloud. He read, I listened: in bars, dormitories, gardens, sitting on benches or beds or on the grass, usually with a beer or red wine in hand. In this way, we travelled with Rushdie through his disturbing, alienating years. It was a two-way process: the reading was coloured by walking, and the walking was coloured by Rushdie’s remembered world, adding a curious multiplicity to our own daily minutiae of buying food, finding somewhere to sleep, washing clothes, fording streams, trudging along dusty lanes.

Since then, during every long walk, we have read aloud every afternoon. Well, Anthony reads and I listen, but it feels as if we are reading as one. We both feel an extraordinary closeness in inhabiting the same parallel world at the same time. A shared inner world, generated by words, is a most intimate experience.

The next year, walking 270km westwards across the Massif Centrale in France, The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier came with us. I remember one evening on a farm, sitting on the front veranda of our cabin, waiting for a rare blue moon to rise as Anthony read of the glorious blue tiles on the Royal Mosque at Isfahan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Author Patti Miller drinking coffee at Mont Blanc, France. Photograph: Supplied

The following year it was a shorter walk, the 170km Tour de Mont Blanc, so we started on the chosen book, James Joyce’s Ulysses, some months earlier. Ulysses came with us on many walks, to Uluru and Byron Bay, and other bushwalks nearer to Sydney. It was read aloud, but quietly, at Bundeena Bowlo, at a pub in Bundanoon and in Katoomba, in a tent on the beach, and every night at home as well. The first night of our long walk, at a chalet in Les Houches in Switzerland, Anthony sat in the back garden and read of Stephen Dedalus wandering and musing on the shore of the Liffey. The words rolled like strange jewels in the air in front of the peaks rising immediately all around the village.

Selecting the “right” book to take walking became a sacred duty. I thought at first I’d picked the wrong one altogether when I selected WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to accompany us across France. It was a walking book of sorts – Sebald did set out on walks in it – but it quickly veered off into the strange dark territory of his mind. But it provided a dark counterpoint to the bright days of walking; the sunny meadows and majestic Pyrénéen oak forests, the sharp snowy clarity of the ranges in the middle distance.

The year after, Patrick White’s Voss walked with us. He didn’t come on an overseas walk, but accompanied us along many bush tracks. I listened to the birth of Mercy, while Voss walked in the outback, in a pub in my Wiradjuri hometown, while the local football team celebrated around us.

Marcel Proust joined our walks along the French Cathar Way last year. For a neurotic sickly fellow, he has done a lot of energetic clambering, over hot rocky limestone ridges and up cliffs to severe chateaux where the Cathars had resisted the corruptions of the Church. But he started at home on our gentle front veranda in the late autumn sun – and it was there one afternoon that an extraordinary thing happened.

Fake by Stephanie Wood review – unmissable tale of love, lies and revelation Read more

As I listened, the words started to form an elaborate architecture in my head, as if they had literally lifted off the page and created something three-dimensional, made of something between words and an image. I had never experienced this before while reading. Was it something to do with words returning to their bodily origins, breathing out into sound, vibrating into another body? Proust writes: “The Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable.” He was describing the processes of memory, but it also describes what happens to words when they are read aloud.

We are taking Proust with us again this year. He does tend to take his time after all, and walking takes time. The best walking book, we have learned, is not the obvious or logical book, it’s the sideways book. It’s the one that will slip in at an angle and open the walking day out, overlaying it with a new colour, or planting a row of seeds to grow and bear fruit with each step we take.

• Patti Miller is the author of The Joy Of High Places, out now through NewSouth