Book #62: The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I tried reading this many years ago, and found it difficult. I just gave it another go, and didn't find it a lot easier.
So, the whole book is meant to be a metaphor for the Christian life. It's divided into two sections, with different "pilgrim" characters travelling to the "Celestial City". The first half focuses on Christian, and his companion Faithful, while the second switches to Christian's wife Christina.
The book is full of characters who are named after different virtues and vices, based on their own characteristics. I probably should have used a dictionary to figure out what some of the different words meant. There are also a lot of places that the characters pass through, which seem to represent obstacles that Christians can face. I was interested to see that this book is where the phrase "Vanity Fair", more famous for the Thackeray novel, but presumably referring to futility rather than narcissism.
I also noticed that there seem to be several episodes about slaying giants, that seem to be meant to represent different types of adversity. Then, of course there is one of the most famous villains of the book, Apollyon. He is presumably meant to be Satan, but I noticed that he wasn't in the book anything like as much as I remembered.
I couldn't really tell you all about what this was about, though its worth reading if you are curious.
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