Pilgrim Book Reviews

Truth be told, this was the initial reason for the website.

During Hecka Walk, I was given in hand about twenty “pilgrim-ish” books, all of them loosely about someone walking from somewhere to somewhere for some reason. On top of those physical ones (that I shipped back to California so that I could read them when I finished), I was recommended another twenty books, minimum, again loosely about someone walking from somewhere to somewhere for some reason. Whether Dude’s Walk Across America, or Bill Bryson’s Walk in the Woods, or JR’s Eat Pray Love, or LKJ’s Peace Pilgrim, what ran through my mind as I peaked through the pages was, “Would a Jew in 500 BC qualify this as a pilgrimage? Would an 800 AD Byzantian call her a pilgrim? Would an Early Modern Spanish Catholic say they had been a true peregrino?”

Alas, it turns out that these questions require loads of research and reading to answer, if they’re answerable at all. So, then: What are the rules of pilgrimage? And who made the rules? If someone says, “I’m on a pilgrimage,” does that make it so?

I have read an enormous amount about historical pilgrimage and what the thinking was behind them, but I haven’t read any of these contemporary stories, ones that you’d find in “Travel” at your local bookstore. But would they be allowed to be on the shelf under “Pilgrimage”? That’s the question that I’ll explore with each “pilgrim book” I was given or recommended.