{"id":491,"date":"2012-09-17T09:57:23","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T17:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=491"},"modified":"2012-09-17T09:57:23","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T17:57:23","slug":"the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/17\/the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry<\/a> by Rachel Joyce<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

1989, I\u2019m sitting in a car in a shopping mall parking lot, waiting for a friend to get off work. I\u2019m 17, reading the last 10 pages or so of Fried Green Tomatoes<\/em>, crying my eyes out. Fast forward to a few days ago, me sitting my home offices, reading the last few pages of Pilgrimage, and for the first time in 23 years, crying my eyes out again. A moving story, touching, gentle, subtle, simple.<\/p>\n

I came to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry<\/em> via the 2012 Booker Prize longlist, and maybe I was on the rebound from reading a rather difficult book before, but I thoroughly enjoyed almost every page of this one. Here\u2019s a man who, on a whim, decides to walk nonstop from the bottom of England to the top. An old man, retired, who never made much of himself except that his life could have been a whole lot worse, and there\u2019s triumph in not succumbing to one\u2019s circumstance. Through the course of the walk he doesn\u2019t overcome personal tragedies as much as he finally addresses old injuries, breaking himself down emotionally so that he can heal up again.<\/p>\n

Rachel Joyce isn\u2019t the first author to write a story about somebody taking along walk. There\u2019s Lawrence Block\u2019s Random Walk<\/em>, and of course Stephen King\u2019s Long Walk<\/em>, and I\u2019m sure many others. I was also reminded of the cross-country running section of Forrest Gump<\/em>, and the young man\u2019s self-imposed austerity in Into the Wild<\/em>. There\u2019s something very compelling about this urge to just start walking, and let everything else disappear behind you. More than once I thought about a man I met in Sonora, CA, who owned a used bookstore and who, himself, had once walked across the United States.<\/p>\n

As I said, the book is subtle, building up to reveal Harold\u2019s past slowly, and along the way the simple descriptions of his daily progress don\u2019t get too bogged down in the mileage. And Joyce does an excellent job of showing how one person, doing something as simple as walking, can have a profound effect on so many others.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce My rating: 4 of 5 stars 1989, I\u2019m sitting in a car in a shopping mall parking lot, waiting for a friend to get off work. I\u2019m 17, reading the last 10 pages or so of Fried Green Tomatoes, crying my eyes out. Fast forward to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-7V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}