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 Peter Jenkin’s Walk Across America, or Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, or Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, or Mildred Norman’s Peace Pilgrim, what ran through my mind as I peaked through their pages was, “Would a Jew in 500 BC qualify this as a pilgrimage? Would an 800 AD Byzantine 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” at the shop nearby a shrine? That’s the question that I’ll explore with each “pilgrim book” I was given or recommended.

God only knows how long it will take to read through them all, but I'm betting the ensuing literary journey will be an enriching "pilgrimage" in its own right.