Bookends: April 2013

The first day of each month, I’m posting a summary of what I read the previous month and what I plan to read in the coming month. I would love if this could become a conversation in the comments about what’s on your reading list, too!

I’m not sure where April went. One minute it was March 31 and crocuses, and the next it’s the first of May and azaleas. I’ve done lots of activities with church and with friends and with the kids. I organized a homeschool ASL class. (ASL=American Sign Language. I thought that was common knowledge, but I’m getting a lot of blank stares when I tell people about the class.) I’ve gotten more sleep (overall) than I usually do. All of this means I’ve had a pretty light reading month.

Grown-ups’ Books:

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Murder/abduction mystery about a man who acts squirrely when his wife goes missing; includes an account of their whole squirrely past together.)

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (18-century British satire/fictional travel journal told by a narrator of questionably trustworthiness)

Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby (Semi-memoir which attempts to answer the question, “Why is the United States still so racially segregated?”)

Usually I put a little note here about which book I liked best, but I seriously don’t think it makes sense to compare these three books to one another. The Tanner Colby book challenged my assumptions about race relations in the U.S. and challenged me to recommit to seeking out and eliminating (or at least being aware of) white privilege in my life; Gulliver’s Travels challenged me with its 18th-century language and cultural references; and Gone Girl challenged me to look past a couple of inaccuracies to see the story itself and to tackle Monday on only about 2.5 hours of sleep. They all had their strengths and weaknesses, and I enjoyed each as I was reading it.

Kids’ Books:

We read lots of books this month but nothing that really stood out as outstanding. We all liked Mike Venezia’s series about artists. We read Pieter Bruegel, DaVinci, and Michelangelo. My daughter loved the little cartoony comments and illustrations throughout.

We also enjoyed Starry Messenger by Peter Sís, which offers a brief account of Galileo’s life and work. The illustrations are beautiful and the story engaging.

Currently Reading

I’m still reading Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny by Alexandra Lapierre, and I seriously need to either finish it or quit reading it and give it back to its owner this month. I’m also reading Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, which I think could easily spawn several blog posts once I’m through feeling angry at it for reinforcing the message that I need to be doing all kinds of things I don’t want to do (like have fun and feel grateful for stuff).

My kids and I are reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone together. My daughter asked me if I enjoyed the Harry Potter books when I was a kid. I had to break it to her that they’d not been written when I was a kid, but that I had enjoyed reading them in my late 20′s.

To-Read for May (and beyond)

I’m not making much of a reading plan for May. I plan to read Fluent in Faith by Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar for a discussion group at church, and I want to read something from my Cavalcade of Classics, but I’m not sure if that will be Dickens’s Oliver Twist or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I was going to re-read John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany for the library book club, but it turns out I’m joining a community band with my daughter, which has rehearsal the same night as book club meets. I still might read it (it’s one of my favorite books), but it will probably end up on the back burner.

What have you enjoyed reading in the past month? What’s on your to-read list for May? If you blog your answer, please post a link in the comments (and/or link back to this post, if you’re so inclined).

Related articles

• Bookends: February 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: January 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: November 2012 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2012: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2011: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: March 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my post-Gulliver’s Travels palate-cleanser read, and for this purpose, it worked just fine. It engaged me to the point that the night I started the book, I stayed up reading until almost 3:30 am. I stopped when I found—within pages of one another—two inaccuracies that I took rather personally in my addled middle-of-the-night state.

The first was the oft-repeated “the rape never went to trial because she dropped the charges.” Maybe things are different in New York state, but in the two other states where I’ve learned about rape laws, this is not how it works. The plaintiff in a rape trial is the state, not the victim. The victim is a witness for the state. She/he can neither press charges nor drop charges, but merely reports the crime and provides physical evidence and testimony for the state against the defendant. The fact that the character who said this was an attorney especially annoyed me. Had it been a non-legal-type person, I could chalk it up to characterization. But since it’s from the mouth of an authority, I can only assume it’s Flynn’s mistake.

The other inaccuracy came from a character who’s not a professional in this particular field and so is a little easier for me to dismiss, but it still grates on me. The character uses a tourniquet on the character’s arm (sorry for the awkward wording; I’m trying not to use gendered pronouns so as not to spoil any of the plot). I did some fairly rudimentary training as a first responder back in my 20′s, and I remember being told that we should only place a tourniquet if the blood loss was bad enough that it was worth losing the limb. The paramedic who did our training explained that because a tourniquet is so effective at stopping blood flow, placing one pretty much guarantees the death of the limb below the tourniquet. He taught us how to use pressure on the arteries at different pulse points to staunch blood flow without the risk of the death of the limb. As the character intended to retain the use of this limb and there’s no evidence to suggest quick and significant blood loss, it would seem that a tourniquet wouldn’t be a good choice in this situation.

And then there was the twice-repeated insistence that an early-term fetus was a boy or a girl, something you can’t tell until nearly halfway through a pregnancy without genetic testing. This inaccuracy was probably the least annoying to me, though, because the character making the assertion of sex has no qualms about lying, so I could chalk it up to that.

Okay, so we’ve established that I take factual inaccuracies in literature pretty personally. But inaccuracies aside, this was a decent book. I’m not a huge fan of mysteries (especially ones that contain scenarios that are so air-tight no one can escape them…I just don’t find this kind of thing plausible), so I appreciated that Flynn used the novel as an opportunity to comment on the nature of romantic relationships and especially marriage. She brings up some very interesting points about the acts we put on in the pursuit of love and acceptance and the feeling of belonging. Flynn addresses issues of vulnerability and plays out dramatically the reasons why we so often fear opening ourselves up even though vulnerability is crucial for any close relationship. She’s essentially asked, “what’s the worst that can happen if I let myself be vulnerable?” and then given us many examples of just what can happen when we trust one another (spoiler alert: they’re largely not good things).

Flynn also addresses the issue of compromise in a marriage. I think it’s fairly widely accepted that a harmonious relationship requires give and take, and Flynn takes this idea to an extreme. What is the nature of unconditional love? What are we willing to give up for the sake of harmony? When do our differences become irreconcilable?

And then there’s what a marriage looks like from the outside compared to what it looks like from the inside. The private jokes we share and the little unspoken understandings that make up a close relationship sometimes look downright strange from the outside.

These commentaries about marriage were especially satisfying for me to read. I didn’t expect this kind of insight from a murder mystery; it was a pleasant surprise. I would have preferred if there had been more growth from the characters, but it was a fun read nonetheless. I also got a kick out of the characters being my age.

View all my reviews

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History of my Travels for Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious of Ornament as of Truth. I could perhaps like others have astonished thee with strange improbably Tales; but I rather chose to relate plain Matter of Fact in the simplest Manner and Style; because my principal Design was to inform, and not to amuse thee.”

This book took me a long time to read. I couldn’t figure out why it was taking me so long until I started quoting sections to my sister and my spouse and on my blog and realized just how much translation English from this era requires. So, I let myself off the hook a little bit and just tried to enjoy my leisurely reading pace. I’m glad to have read this book, but I’ll also be glad to move onto to something written in more contemporary language.

I admit, I think a fair amount of this book was lost on me. Throughout it I was unsure about whether the opinions Gulliver expressed were meant to be his alone or if they reflected Swift’s opinions as well.

Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America by Tanner Colby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found Some of My Best Friends Are Black by accident at our town library. The book flap summary seemed interesting, so I picked it up. It turned out to complement Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow quite well, offering a very personal look at the ongoing effects of racial segregation in our churches, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.

The two sections I found most interesting were the one about real estate and the one about re-integrating Catholic churches in southern Louisiana. In the real estate section, I was particularly struck by Colby’s description of racially restrictive covenants in real estate. Turns out the modern suburb developed largely as a result of one developer’s desire to make money off of white people’s fears of living near black people. I knew I didn’t like suburbs (particularly housing developments with draconian homeowners’ associations), but now I have another concrete reason to dislike them. In most locations, these racial covenants are still part of the agreements of the housing developments, even though they’re no longer enforceable by law.

In the section about churches, I found the entire history of segregation within both Catholic and Protestant churches very interesting, but I especially appreciated how Colby demonstrated just how difficult it is to get back to more integrated places of worship once these communities have been separated. This is a major issue for many churches in the United States; I know it’s a major concern for my denomination wherever we’ve lived. Colby shows that there is hope, but that integrating our churches requires sacrifice and trust on the part of everyone involved, and of course, trust isn’t something that’s been in great supply between black and white communities in the United States in the last couple of hundred years.

More than four decades after Jim Crow laws in the South were overturned, the United States is still struggling to become racially integrated. The segregation is no longer mandated by law, but the generations of separation have had ripple effects that have proven very difficult to change. Colby’s stories show these difficulties in detail, but he also offers hope that, with a lot of time and effort, we will eventually heal this rift and become a fully integrated culture.

View all my reviews

Bookends: March 2013

The first day of each month, I’m posting a summary of what I read the previous month and what I plan to read in the coming month. I would love if this could become a conversation in the comments about what’s on your reading list, too!

It would be so much cooler if I posted an April Fool’s post, but alas! I’m playing this one straight and patently uncool.

Despite my best intentions, I did not complete any books from my Cavalcade of Classics this month. It was one of those months when great books just kept sneaking into my currently-reading pile. As pleasant as it is to delve into four or five books at a time, it isn’t the most efficient way to actually finish any one of those books.

In other words, I’m still working on Gulliver’s Travels.

But I did manage to complete a fair number of books this month; that list follows. Links are to my reviews, either on this site or on Goodreads. Titles without links are books I’ve not reviewed yet:

Grown-ups’ Books:

The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings (Picture book for adults and older children illustrating the capture and transport of slaves from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.)

Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarantonio (a variety of supernatural or otherwise scary short stories written by a variety of authors. I got this on audiobook and have not listened to all of it. Once I finish it, it will show up on a later Bookends. Follow the link to my Goodreads review of what I’ve read so far.)

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (McEwan’s latest, written from the perspective of a young British MI5 employee in the 1970′s. Because it’s by McEwan, you know it’s got to have a twist (or two) before the final page. My sister and I read this for our “Sisters Book Club.” We intend to write a joint book review to post on Imperfect Happiness, but so far that seems to be more difficult than we expected it would be. We’re not entirely sure how to write a detailed review without revealing too much about the plot.)

Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelly (nonfiction; a series of vignettes written by two hospice nurses about the final moments of dozens of individuals and the similarities between their experiences.)

Walking Home by Lucy and Susan Letcher (memoir; the second of two books about the Letcher sisters’ travels on the Appalachian Trail. Their first, Soutbound, was about their trip from Maine to Georgia. This one is about their trip back north.)

Of these, I think I liked Final Gifts best. It offered me a new perspective on death and dying, and has given me much to consider. It was also surprisingly enjoyable to read.

Kids’ Books:

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (fictionalized memoir of the author’s experiences as a Vietnamese refugee settling in Alabama; written in verse)

The Complete Book Of Dragons by Edith Nesbit (short stories about—well, dragons. And princesses and princes and naughty children and witches and evil kings)

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (written from the point of view of Ivan, a captive gorilla living in an indoor circus off the interstate)

Magic or Not? by Edward Eager (my favorite of the Tales of Magic series. This one introduces a whole new group of kids and a lot more ambiguity about whether the magical occurrences are truly magical or just coincidences.)

I’m not sure I have a favorite among these; they were all very good. Maybe Magic or Not? edges the others out a bit, although I feel a little strange picking it over a book that got the National Book Award and another that won the Newbery Medal.

Currently Reading

Like at the end of February, I’m still reading Some of My Best Friends are Black by Tanner Colby and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I’m also reading the biography Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny by Alexandra Lapierre, which a friend at church loaned me (one of those books that snuck its way into my currently-reading pile).

My daughter and I haven’t started a new book since we finished Inside Out & Back Again, so we’ll have to decide what’s next on our list.

To-Read for April (and beyond)

In April (after we’ve reviewed Sweet Tooth), my sister and I plan to start reading The New Jim Crow together. We’re going to take it slowly and follow the study guide from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, so we will not have that one done by the end of April. I really want to finish Gulliver’s Travels, and I would love to start an finish another of the classics on my list. Next up will either be a re-read of Pride and Prejudice or Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. As much as I love Dickens (and I do love Dickens), if I go with Oliver Twist I’m going to want to read something fun by a contemporary female author either at the same time or right after. What that would be, I really don’t know right now, but I’m sure I’ll figure out something. I might also end up reading The Fall by Steve Taylor with some friends. But I’m also planning to try to exercise and meditate more regularly, and I’ve recently starting attending a new discussion group, so I might need to de-prioritize frenetic reading.

What have you enjoyed reading in the past month? What’s on your to-read list for April? If you blog your answer, please post a link in the comments (and/or link back to this post, if you’re so inclined).

Related articles

• Bookends: February 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: January 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: November 2012 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2012: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2011: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do,” says Ivan, the narrator of Katherine Applegate’s Newbery Medal-winning novel.

In The One and Only Ivan, Applegate, with a light touch and an aching poignance, tells a tale of friendship reminiscent of E.B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web.

Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying

Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Back when I was a doula, I had this thought that working with women through the birthing process must be similar to working in hospice with people who were dying. I didn’t share this thought with many people. In general, I would try not to mention death to pregnant women, and I worried that anyone not involved in doula work might think I was just weird. But to me—next to being born, which for most of us is stored only in our implicit memory and therefore inaccessible with our conscious methods of “remembering”—giving birth was the closest one could get to the process of dying without actually dying. I kept this notion largely to myself and quietly kept my eyes out for people who’d worked with both laboring women and dying people to either confirm or disprove this idea, all the while wondering if I dared try doula-ing to the dying and finding out for myself.

And then I started this book and read in the third chapter:

“As nurses who care for the dying, we see ourselves as the counterparts of birthing coaches or midwives, who assist in bringing life from the womb into the world. At the other end of life, we help to ease the transition from life through death to whatever exists beyond.”

The authors go on to draw parallels between the medicalization of birth and the medicalization of death, in which both natural processes were moved out of the sphere of home and family and into the closed-off corridors of medical facilities. Birth and death became events cloaked in secrecy and silence rather than transitions to be experienced surrounded by those who love us. Thankfully, this trend seems to be shifting.

Mostly the book is made up of brief accounts of the last moments of dozens of individuals. I read these with the emotion and enthusiasm with which I used to read birth stories in the days before I’d ever attended a birth or given birth myself. I read them hungrily, with the sense that there is a hidden truth in them and that I need only see these stories from the proper angle for this truth to be revealed.

The authors point out the similarities between different stories, and encourage the reader to find significance in these similarities. They give suggestions for maintaining the awareness and open-mindedness necessary to receive the often cryptic or confusing messages that dying people sometimes try to convey. They encourage the reader to remember that the dying person is still a person—an individual going through a momentous transition and experiencing a wide range of emotions and sensations that we can only guess at. The authors encourage compassion and connection, and they talk with reverence about the honor of being a part of these families’ lives, if only for a short time.

This is all so very similar to how I feel about being with a woman in labor. Probably in part because it was so familiar, the insights from these stories helped ease some of my fears about my own inevitable death. They helped me to see the beauty in the transition and the many gifts that the dying have to offer us, and it reminded me that emotional pain isn’t always bad, isn’t always something to avoid. The message I got from this book is that there is tremendous power and grace in opening ourselves to the emotional pain that accompanies death. It is a beautiful, powerful book, and I would recommend it to everyone. (My only caveat: I would caution against reading it sitting in the back of the library story room while your children are in Story Time. People seem to feel a little uncomfortable when a woman is choking back sobs while children sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”.)

View all my reviews

Walking Home by Lucy and Susan Letcher

Walking Home by Lucy and Susan Letcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the sequel to Southbound, The Barefoot Sisters’ account of their southbound Appalachian Trail thru-hike. I didn’t like this one quite as much as I liked the first book, but this one was still enjoyable.

A couple of things I really enjoyed about this book:

1) This thru-hike took place in 2001. I know about more 2001 thru-hikes than I do about hikes from any other years. My friend’s mom and her husband thru-hiked the AT in 2001, and TREK – A Journey on the Appalachian Trail, a documentary I watched and quite enjoyed this past year, follows a group of friends on a 2001 thru-hike. Making the trip seem in a way even more familiar, I also discovered that Isis graduated high school the same year as I did, so I was able to draw parallels between what her 2001 was like and what mine was. While they were hiking through Virginia, I was starting an editing job at a major corporation one state away. While they were walking through the mountains, I was training for a marathon I never ran. It’s possible that I might have been in Asheville, North Carolina, at the same time they were visiting there. And then of course there was the way they learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, which is a story that each of us alive at that time shares. Reading about their shock, fear, and confusion reawakened the shock, fear, and confusion that I felt that morning. In a lot of ways, this thru-hike felt closer to me than their southbound hike, which was both enjoyable and a bit uncomfortable since there still is a huge amount of doubt about whether I will ever actually thru-hike the AT. But then, I like a bit of discomfort; it keeps me from becoming complacent.

2) A few times they touched upon the privilege that allows people to take six months off to take a long walk. The clearest example I found was on page 125 when jackrabbit talks about what she considers the rather obnoxious attitude of a business owner nearby the trail who seemed to assume that hikers would steal from his business just because they were hkers. Another hiker, Fiddler, recognizes the demographics of the majority of thru-hikers and suggests that maybe this is a good experience for hikers. “Look at us,” he says. “How many white, middle-class Americans know what discrimination feels like? Maybe if we realize what it’s like to be followed by stares and whispers, we’ll be less likely to do it to somebody else.” This is something I’ve been having some trouble with when thinking about planning a thru-hike: while I’m trying to be aware of privilege and ways that I can let go of my unearned privilege, here I am planning an activity that depends very much on the privilege that allows me to save up the money for a long-distance hike and feel reasonably confident that I will be greeted along the trail with the same goodwill that the Letcher sisters describe. The idea that I might learn something valuable along the way is a comfort, I suppose, albeit not much of one, but I do appreciate that they at least touched upon the issue of privilege.

It was nice that the sisters got their easy (compared to their southbound hike), fun thru-hike, but it felt like there was a little something—perhaps tension?—missing from this one. This easier hike up the better-traveled northbound route seemed less significant in a way. There was little doubt the sisters would make it to Katahdin, there was less detail about their travels and it was more difficult for me to follow where they were on the trail, and there were more spring-break-like side trips. It just seemed more like a party this time around and less like a pilgrimage. I don’t know that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this, it just wasn’t as satisfying to me as their account of their first trip was.

View all my reviews

Related articles

• Southbound by Lucy and Susan Letcher (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Reasons hikers and backpackers leave the Appalachian Trail (writer77.wordpress.com)

Bookends: February 2013

The first day of each month, I’m posting a summary of what I read the previous month and what I plan to read in the coming month. I would love if this could become a conversation in the comments about what’s on your reading list, too!

I only completed two grown-up books in February, but one of those was the first book from my Cavalcade of Classics reading list. Woo-hoo! I’ve made a lot of progress on several other books, but I’ve not finished any of those yet. March’s “Bookends” should look pretty sweet.

The kids and I also hit a bit of a dry spell with kids’ books. We’ve ready many, but I only found two that really struck my fancy.

Now, the list. Links are to my reviews, either on this site or on Goodreads. Titles without links are books I’ve not reviewed yet:

Grown-ups’ Books:

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (A novelist and new father investigates the cultural reasons for why we eat what we eat and asks himself what values our food choices reflect, both consciously and unconsciously)

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (A man leaves his wife and children to trek to the Celestial City and save his immortal soul. It was surprisingly like the long-distance hiking narratives I’ve been reading only with rather a more impressive ending.)

At the time I was reading Eating Animals, I was completely blown away. That initial rush has tempered a bit with time. I still agree with his basic premise, and I still think it’s a great book (and I’m still not eating any animal products), I just no longer have the, “Wow! What a book!” feeling I had right after I finished it. I guess it’s difficult for me to sustain a lot of intense emotion about something as mundane and everyday as what I eat. I did get a new cookbook—Clean Start by Terry Walters—which has some pretty exciting recipes in it. All of recipes are gluten-free and vegan! Mostly they have not-wacky ingredients, too, except for one I want to try calls that for fresh turmeric. I don’t recall ever having seen fresh turmeric before. It actually never really occurred to me that it came in a form other than the golden powder I use in my homemade curry paste. I’m not even sure where I would go to find such a thing.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was good, but mostly I’m just glad to be done with it.

Kids’ Books:

Follow the Dream by Peter Sís (Brief, expertly illustrated biography of Christopher Columbus)

The Discovery of the Americas by Betsy and Giulio Maestro (An overview of the many voyages to what are today North and South America, from prehistory to the 16th century.)

In addition to these, my daughter read Three Swords for Granada on her own and really enjoyed it. “You really should read Three Swords for Granada, Mommy!” She says she wants to start a blog. Maybe she can start posting her own book reviews.

My son’s reading list still consists mainly of Berenstain Bears books. I’m going to make him wait until he’s four before he can have his own blog, though.

Currently Reading

Right now I’m reading Walking Home by Susan and Lucy Letcher, Some of My Best Friends are Black by Tanner Colby, Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth for Sisters Book Club (Sisters Book Club is just my sister and me reading the same book at the same time, but I like giving things grand-ish names), and—for my Cavalcade of Classics—Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which four chapters in already contains many more references to bodily functions than I usually encounter in classics of literature. And I just started Final Gifts by Maggie Callahan and Patricia Kelley, which I hope to finish for a book discussion on March 6th.

My daughter and I are almost through with Magic or Not? by Edward Eager. I’m not at all sure what’s next on our list. Probably The Well-Wishers, which is the next (and last) book in the series.

To-Read for March (and beyond)

After I’ve finished a couple of the books I’m currently reading, I’ve got a lot more lined up. I’m going to be re-reading The New Jim Crow for Sisters Book Club. I really want to finally finish Everyday Blessings by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn (my friend loaned it to me ages ago, and I’m feeling a little bad that I’ve been holding onto it for so long), and I need to get to the Fanny Stevenson biography another friend loaned me.  This seems like kind of a lot, but I guess I’ll see how far I’ve gotten on March 31st.

What have you enjoyed reading in the past month? What’s on your to-read list for March? If you blog your answer, please post a link in the comments (and/or link back to this post, if you’re so inclined).

Related articles

• Bookends: January 2013 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Bookends: November 2012 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2012: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• 2011: My Year in Books (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, To That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s taken me a while, but I have finished the first book on my list of 88+ Classics to read within five years. I’ll ignore for the moment the fact that I need to really bump up my pace if I’m going to meet my goal, and instead just celebrate being done with this one particular book.

So, hooray! I’m done with The Pilgrim’s Progress!

The Pilgrim’s Progress is made up of two parts: Part I follows Christian as he travels through an allegorical landscape to the equally allegorical Celestial City, and Part II follows his wife, Christiana, and their sons as they make their allegorical trek after Christian.

The edition I have—the Penguin Classics paperback—has an introduction and notes by Roger Sharrock. I didn’t read Sharrock’s introduction, but his notes helped give some historical context and some explanation for some of the symbols, which helped clear some of the haze of confusion in which I sometimes found myself.

In Part I we hear a lot of conversion stories. First we hear Christian’s own story and then we hear the stories of each person Christian meets—and he meets a lot of people. After each person shares his story, we get to hear Christian and his walking buddy (Faithful (until his end in Vanity Fair), and then Hopeful) discussing the flaws in that person’s viewpoint. For someone so fearful and doubting at the beginning of the tale, Christian ends up pretty judgmental of others’ stories and motivations by the end. He criticizes those who are attracted by the fervor of the pilgrims, as well as those who take too intellectual an approach toward religion.

“For they are these talkative fools,” Christian says, “whose religion is only in word, and are debauched and vain in their conversation, that being so much admitted into the fellowship of the godly do stumble the world, blemish Christianity, and grieve the sincere.”

In Part I, the path to the Celestial City is a very difficult one, and very few people are likely to measure up and to make it past all of the dangers to their final reward. Christian’s pilgrimage is one he takes largely on his own, and each test he encounters is one that challenges his personal faith.

There is a big focus in this section on the importance of turning away from one’s family and friends when they don’t support one’s pilgrimage. Christian turns away from his family, leaving them behind to what he believes will be certain death, and then the first of his two main traveling companions does the same. As Faithful explains when another pilgrim questions him about his lineage, “although all these that he named might claim kindred of me, and that rightly (for indeed they were my relations, according to the flesh), yet since I became a pilgrim they have disowned me, and I also have rejected them.”

Part II is a lot less personal, and it seems much easier to be a successful pilgrim. In part, this is explained by the fact that Christian worked so hard to clear so many dangers out of the way for those who came after him. Dangers that nearly cost Christian his life, or at least his faith, his wife and sons pass through with very little hardship. The Slough of Despond? No problem. The Valley of Humiliation? Hardly even mentioned. The Enchanted Ground and the Arbors so tempting to weary travelers but so deadly to those who succumb to their weariness and rest a while? Christiana and her companions pass by without a second glance. What hardships they do face, their guide Great-heart sweeps aside for good, presumably clearing the way for even more pilgrims to reach the Promised Land.

While there are challenges to be met along the way in Part II, they are primarily challenges based on the pilgrim’s own inherent weakness as women and children. Bunyan mentions this weakness over and over, and it’s because of this weakness that Christiana and her party get special guidance to the City from the brave Great-heart. Not only does Great-heart have intimate knowledge of the way ahead, any danger they encounter he dispatches with fierce efficiency. After he’s vanquished several foes, he and the other men who’ve joined the pilgrims actually seek out giants to slay. Great-heart is so successful and so easily so, I found myself wondering why he didn’t help Christian and so many other pilgrims before. Maybe it’s some statement about how the challenges one meets along the road match the challenges one holds in one’s individual soul. Or something like that.

Christiana initially takes along her children and her friend, Mercy, whose decision to become a pilgrim is inspired by Christiana’s faith. They travel in the wake of Christiana’s husband’s success, celebrated everywhere they go as the family of Christian. As they travel the King’s Highway, they pick up more and more followers. While in Part I Christian seemed reluctant to take on imperfect travel companions, Christiana’s crew makes concessions to those who are week in body, mind, or spirit to help them along. I don’t quite get why Christian’s journey was so solitary while his wife’s is a community event.

Not knowing the details of the ebb and flow of religious persecution in England during the mid- to late-17th century—and not really caring to take time out to research it at this point—it’s not clear to me how many of the differences between Part I and Part II are a reflection of the change in acceptance of Puritans between the writing of Part I and the writing of Part II, and how much they are simply a reflection of the evolution of Bunyan’s personal faith. It’s possible the differences could also be influenced by the commercial success of Part I. Perhaps after that success, Bunyan’s goals were different for the second part. I’m sure someone’s written about this, and I could probably read for years about it, if I chose to. Which I don’t.

There were a fair number of events in both parts of the book that confused me (not the least of which is the recommendation that all of the children born to Christiana’s sons’ wives along the way be left to be raised by a man they meet along the way), but I also found some very poignant language and imagery. Great-heart especially has some gems, like when he’s describing the difficulties of Mr Fearing, who reached the Celestial City but was so fearful the whole way that he needed special help and encouragement practically to the very end. “He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was.”

This opened up for me a new possible interpretation of “the fear of God.” I’d always thought of this as just the fear of God’s punishment, but I wonder if it could also refer to a fear of God’s grace, or a fear of being found unworthy of such grace. Or maybe it’s a fear of leaving behind the thoughts and behaviors that are familiar but that hold us back from being more than what we are in this moment.

At any rate, I’m glad that I read the book. I don’t know that I have a great understanding of Puritan theology or even a better understanding of it than I had before I started, but it was fairly pleasant to read. At the same time, I am very glad that I’m done with it. I was getting a little tired of pilgrimages by the end of Part II. And I really need to go back and read Little Women again; I can’t quite imagine how the March girls go about “playing pilgrims” based on this book.

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