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    The Pilgrim's Progress
    The Pilgrim's Progress
    The Pilgrim's Progress
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Pilgrim's Progress

    Written by John Bunyan

    Narrated by James Langton

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream."

    So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. An acknowledged classic of the heroic Puritan tradition, and a founding text in the development of the English novel, The Pilgrim's Progress has inspired readers for over three centuries. The story of Christian, whose pilgrimage takes him through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and the Delectable Mountains, is full of danger and adventure. Together with his trusty companions, Faithful and Hopeful, he encounters many enemies before finally arriving at the Celestial City.

    John Bunyan's own experience of religious persecution informs his story, but its qualities of psychological realism, and the beauty and simplicity of his prose, give the book universal appeal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 24, 2010
    ISBN9781400188086
    Author

    John Bunyan

    John Bunyan (1628–1688) was a Reformed Baptist preacher in the Church of England. He is most famous for his celebrated Pilgrim's Progress, which he penned in prison. Bunyan was author of nearly sixty other books and tracts, including The Holy War and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. 

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    Reviews for The Pilgrim's Progress

    3.5/5

    74 ratings60 reviews

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    • 1/5
      I don't know if this is the worst book that I've ever read or if the audiobook was so atrocious that it made it into the worst thing ever. This book was a nightmare. I get it, I get it, I know it's supposed to be a Christian allegory, but listening to six hours of this (fully fucking dramatized) was hell. HELL. I wanted to bleach my ears. I couldn't handle it anymore, did Satan narrate this? This book made the Lord of the Rings trilogy look like a cake walk!! The Pilgrim's Progress was a long ass journey to heaven made by "Christian" and other people he runs into. They face all sorts of dumb shit and get into dumb trouble and make lots of dumb decisions but SOME FUCKING HOW still make it to heaven (spoiler alert). Christian loses lots of companions, walks into dumb scenarios every other page, but luckily for him, he had some faith so he made it. UGH. I hate everything. I'm glad this nightmare book is over.
    • 5/5
      By reputation John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the classics of English literature, being in print continuously since 1678 and being translated into over 200 languages. In its essence it is the story of Christian faith, following a person of faith as he journeys through life until he arrives at his heavenly home. It is told from the vantage point of a dream and makes excellent use of the method of allegory. Bunyan wrote this masterpiece in two parts, the first being the story of the journey of a pilgrim, Christian, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part is the story of his wife, Christiana, and their four children taking the same journey several years later. Christiana had mocked her husband when he left and she delights in learning the details of his travel as she finds herself being led along the same road. I found Christiana's travels more compelling, perhaps due to the way in which vibrant faith was also expressed in the children.While Bunyan used allegory to tell this story everything about it comes across as something he knows first-hand, either from his own personal experience as a Christian who was jailed for his faith, or that he learned while serving as a pastor. The struggles that Christian and Christiana go through, although written over 300 years ago, are the struggles of Christians today. And so are the joys and delights that are found in the Christian life. I received this book three years ago as a gift from someone who said he read from it often. And now, having read it myself, I am beginning to understand why, and I anticipate I will follow his habit.
    • 3/5
      The classic 17th century Christian allegory.I thought this was worth reading for its literary significance and classic status. I'm glad that I read it, but I'm not sure I'll read it again.A couple of things I didn't like were:1. Christian seems to have no great connection with his family, friends or companions. He seems too quick to abandon people, and this made it difficult for me to connect with the character.2. The allegory is too direct. Yes, we all know it's an allegorical work, but it just seems too specific and everything has a one-to-one relationship with Christian theology.
    • 1/5
      Insufferable. Period
    • 2/5
      869 The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan (read 28 Sep 1966) Every literate person has to read this book so I did. I kind of looked on it as a duty, and when I was finished I felt "now, I've read it."
    • 3/5
      This is an abbreviated version with fantastic illustrations. Probably very good to read to children but a bit too simplistic for adults. Enjoyable none the less.
    • 2/5
      John Bunyan writes, Pilgrim’s Progress; his allegory, his dream; depicting a spiritual journey leading to everlasting freedom while he himself was in prison. Dreams were given great significance in the ancient world. Pilgrim’s Progress is a dream, with characters and events symbolizing knowledge, and lessons learned throughout the story, which is quite an adventure. An adventure, that would appeal to both adult and child.
    • 2/5
      In 2015 The Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels published in English, listed in chronological order of publication. Under Covid inspired lockdown, I have taken up the challenge.The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678, is the first in the list.I was underwhelmed. It is a Christian allegory, and has remained popular and recommended (although possible less read) ever since publication. I found the prose turgid and the content nonsensical.The 17th century had Shakespeare and poetry, and I expected more of the prose fiction of the era, but the genre had not really been established. Five hundred years after the Tale of Genji, English literaure was waiting for its first novel.The 17th century was also the dawn of the Enlightenment. Newton published Principia Mathematica 10 years after Pilgrim's Progress. In that context, Pilgim's Progress seems a last echoing cry of the non-rational world.
    • 5/5
      There is a reason why this is the most widely published Christian book outside of the Bible. Bunyan, with seriousness and at times with humor, dissects the human condition. I recommend this both to Christians and non-Christians, as it reveals the subtle deceit of many paradigms that we encounter in our lifetime.
    • 5/5
      I'm actually upset at myself that I hadn't read this before now. Hard to believe that it was written 350 years ago but still holds true for anyone today; a great way for a doubter or non believer to be introduced to the story of the Bible; though it's hard to recognize some of it.
    • 5/5
      This is a Christian book. But its principles of not getting tricked or waylaid off your chosen path as a baseball player or President. We get off our goals just as easily as a Christian apparently gets away from his or her goals in life.
    • 2/5
      This is a book that must have been groundbreaking for its time. I did not enjoy it too much. Christian, the main character has almost an obstacle course of sinners and evil to pass through to get to his final destination. I found myself hoping he would fail rather than succeed.
    • 1/5
      I've hated this book for as long as I can remember, even though I'd never read it. For five years, every school day, my Headmaster would take his reading for assembly from this one book. Bored rigid by the smug tedious Christian, wishing just once that Apollyon or Giant Despair would win, I swore eternal enmity to John Bunyan, his book and the plodding hymns it inspired.Well I've now read it (I have a very nice Folio Edition) and I'm pleased to say I haven't changed my mind. What a priggish, self-satisfied, pile of tosh it really is. I see now that is as much a political treatise as a religious work, but that simply makes it cynical as well as dull, in my view
    • 2/5
      For those too lazy to read the Bible or too dumb to form even a surface level interpretation of Christianity, there’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The journey of the Christian spirit cloaked in the thinnest of allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book in two parts, the first part dealing with a man named Christian making his way to the celestial city (heaven, obviously). Part two follows his wife Christiana making a very, very similar journey. The names are indicative of the level of both subtlety and creativity that Bunyan put into this book.

      The lack of subtlety is perhaps an unfair criticism, as Bunyan was clearly writing this book for the absolute lowest common denominator, but that proves to be a problem in its own right. For instance, Bunyan writes about brothers Passion and Patience to illustrate that patience is a virtue and that rash passion is bad: this is the 1678 precursor to the kid shows that nowadays run on the Christian TV channels to teach young children how to behave. Though Bunyan litters the book with Bible quotes, this book doesn’t contain any hint of the moral complexity that the Bible often explores: these lessons are black-and-white, the completely one-dimensional characters identified as on the side of good or evil immediately once their names are revealed (Goodwill, Faithful, and Old Honest are all good, surprise surprise). Not only does Bunyan make everything as simple as possible to promote mass consumption, but he also tries to gussy up the lessons by adding action scenes throughout the journey. In part 1 Christian fights a demon, and then in part 2 no less than four giants are slain, and the beast from the Book of Revelation is driven off as well (suggesting that Bunyan never grasped any of the symbolic meaning of the Book of Revelation at all). This is the Hollywood blockbuster of its time, designed to entertain and make the ideas within palatable to as broad an audience as possible, not to challenge the reader in any way. Unfortunately, the Bible isn't something that can be reduced to this type of bland and bite-sized entertainment without losing much of what makes it great.

      What makes this book so painful to read is that Bunyan’s purpose in writing it, to set out the path a person needs to follow to get into heaven, has been done so much better elsewhere. Specifically Dante’s Divine Comedy puts Pilgrim’s Progress to shame in every way that I can think of, not to mention the Bible of course. Dante’s Divine Comedy is the closer parallel, as Dante is also using the journey of a man to illustrate the necessary traits and steps for getting into heaven and what steps to avoid. Dante not only wrote of the circles of Hell, levels of purgatory, and spheres of heaven to illustrate how a person should act, he was also doing a myriad of other things as well: writing about Italian politics at the time, merging the classical myths and teachings with the Christian system of morality, writing a moving letter to his deceased first love Beatrice, redefining the Italian language, and mapping the heavenly cosmos in detail. Not only did Dante do all of this, but he also did it all exceptionally well. For instance, each of the three stairs at the entrance to the mountain of Purgatory has a specific meaning- nothing is added at random, everything is in its place. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in comparison, seems slapdash and lazy. Bunyan isn’t trying to do very much, just sketch some moral lessons that lead a soul to heaven in the least nuanced manner possible. Why is the Slough of Despond located where it is? Or the arbor called Slothful’s Friend? And why does Christian run into Atheist when he does? And why doesn’t Christiana run into Atheist at all? The answer seems to be that Bunyan decided to put those challenges where they are because that's when he thought up the lesson while writing the story, not because he had a clear concept of a soul’s journey, or that the placement was particularly symbolic, or any other good reason. He could have switched around the challenges the pilgrims faced in their journeys and nothing would have been lost. Thus, you finish Pilgrim’s Progress and feel nothing comparable to the unified vision of the universe that you get with Dante, just a bunch of disjointed lessons that are mostly mind-numbingly simplistic. It doesn’t help that Bunyan decides to go over the same journey twice, with only slightly different challenges the second time around.

      Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a story of the soul’s journey to heaven that delivers only the simplest lessons, told in an uncreative way, and which seems thrown together instead of set in a specific order for a specific purpose. Despite the action added by Bunyan the journey isn’t a particularly interesting one- it's lacking all subtlety and moral complexity- and it’s rendered even more boring by the journey happening twice. There is no reason to read this book while there are still copies of The Divine Comedy and the Bible left in the world. Your time is much better spent reading one of those- a few pages of either have more worth than the entirety of The Pilgrim's Progress.
    • 4/5
      Hard to actually read but the audio dramatizations are WONDERFUL! We tried it as a "read aloud" with one person reading but always had to say who is speaking. Maybe good for a family to read like a play (have multiple copies) and discuss as you go along. Wonderful alleghory! For younger readers, there are children's versions available to help with understanding.
    • 5/5
      This is a classic for good reason. While it was written three hundred years ago, the characters come to life and shed light on the struggle of living as a Christian. This is a must read.
    • 3/5
      This book is ancient! As an allegory of the Christian life, it still makes (almost?) perfect sense today. The second part with Christian's wife and children was kind of boring, probably because it's the retelling of the same story.
    • 3/5
      I'm probably going to regret writing this,but I have to say that worthy though I'm sure it is,I found this book to be almost unreadable and rather boring as well.So much as I would like to praise 'The Pilgrim's Progress',I give it a 3 star only.
    • 4/5
      A true classic for both the Christian and the non-Christian world. Excellent example of allegory.
    • 5/5
      I know exactly how Christian feels. His non-conformity has estranged him not only from the world, but from his wife and children, who laugh at him and his philosophy with the others. Why would Christian choose this lonely path? It is because he has had revelation of the future, which brings realization of the present and past. He simply does not find his lifestyle appealing anymore. It was not a fondness of isolation that brought Christian to his pilgrimage, it was Divine Providence--the Revealer. He did not ignore it and go back to his life of illusion. He asked "What shall I do?", and he was given answer. As we come to learn, setting forth on the pilgrimage is only a first step. Bunyan was not only allegory, Bunyan was life, truth, experience. Spending much of his time in prison, Bunyan related to us why his choices were right. He brought to Christianity something no one had. He brought simple truth, logical reasoning, a map to a map. As our protangonist, Christian, comes to his last step, the world and his family take note of his accomplishments. They become open to the Holy Spirit's whispers. They follow, as Christian showed them how, as Christian learned from Christ. They go from this world, to that which is to come. All Faiths will enjoy this read, as all Faiths have. The book's age is a testament to the wisdoms within. You will recognize all of the characters here--their names reveal them.
    • 2/5
      I'll be brutally honest. I didn't understand this book at all. It seems to be the symbolic journey of a Christian, who meets various challenges and emotions in human form. A lot of people loved it, I didn't get it. The language put me off - it's written in a sort of King James English, which I didn't have the energy to follow.
    • 4/5
      I was looking forward to reading this version of the Christian classic retold in modern English. I vaguely remember being read the original as a child or maybe it was the junior version. Ford's version did not disappoint...well at least the first half.

      The book should really be divided into two with Christian's journey separate from his wife Christiana's. The second book repeats a lot of the first and is really just going over Christian's journey from the perspective of his wife. There didn't seem to be a lot of unique material or new characters. I found myself getting a bit bored and a bit lost in some of the allegory by the end. If this version is faithful to the original then I guess it was Bunyan who wrote Christiana's journey in this way...I would still have given the second part three stars and maybe it would work better if a reader was to read the second part after a considerable break from the first.

      That said, I loved The Pilgrim's Progress and I loved the first half of this version. I would definitely give it five stars or more if that was possible. The author has included all of the Scripture references for the narrative in the margins so the reader can see its origin. She has also added various italicised comments to help the reader understand the spiritual lessons and to draw the truth out. These were great additions.

      So, five stars for part 1 and three for part 2 or try reading the two parts with a significant time gap in the middle. Regardless, every Christian should read a version of this classic book and Ford's is a good option. Recommended.






    • 4/5
      The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan was written in 1678 and can be counted among the most significant works of English literature. It is an allegory, presented as a narration of a dream, and it is divided into two parts. The first part follows protagonist Christian from the City of Destruction, i.e. this world, to the Celestial City, i.e. heaven. Christian sets out on this journey, leaving behind his wife, his children and his home, because he is weighed down by a burden. On his way, he goes through several stages and meets various persons, some of whom accompany him on his journey and some of whom try to convince him of leaving the path he is on. The characters he encounters have, as he himself, very straightforward names that show their main character trait. They can be regarded as flat characters whose name already gives away what their character is like and what their role in the story will be. Examples of such names are Legality, Goodwill, Faithful, Ignorance, Giant Despair, and Mistrust, to name but a few. The same thing can be said for the stages Christian passes through. There is the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, the Hill of Difficulty, or the Delectable Mountains. The second part of The Pilgrim's Progress relates the story of Christiana, Christian's wife, who sets out with her children and Mercy, another woman from the City of Destruction, to follow her husband's path to Mount Zion and the Celestial City.Although the book was written in 1678, the text is very easy to follow as the language is quite simple with no complex sentence structures. Bunyan's writing style is very direct, which is probably due to the fact that the book was intended for a popular and not for a higher-educated academic readership. Being a Christian allegory it was aimed at a broad audience depicting Christian life as the only true way of life. The names of characters and places ensure that there is no trouble in deciphering the allegoric meaning of the novel. Yet, I have read that Bunyan, who is said to have traveled from Bedford to London, was influenced by his personal surroundings in the description of the places in the story. Generally, the book can be approached without much background knowledge, but you probably might get more out of it with a religious background.On the whole, 3.5 stars as the second part was somewhat repetitive after having read the first one. Plus, I felt I was getting a moralizing lecture.
    • 3/5
      Yes, I liked this book. Although I am not normally interested in this kind of Christian literature, I own that it is cleverly written, with plain and simple words which make you feel in peace. Perhaps the best way to enjoy this book would be to read it aloud for the musicality of the sentences.
    • 2/5
      Honestly, I love Christian Allegory, but I felt this was a diluted rip off of the Everyman moral play. I was looking forward to a provocative tale but this came up short with blatant imagery pulled together with the smallest bit of finesse. Sorry to be so scathing Mr. Bunyan. I get that it was to be accessible to the common man, but this is more a pamphlet than a serious piece of literature.The only reason I think I'll keep reading it is so that I know the references and allusions people take from it. It's an easy enough read.
    • 1/5
      This book wasn't bad or awful, per se, it was simply painfully dull and boring with absolutely no vested interest in what occurs with the characters. Which brings us to the characters! Look, I get that this is a biblically-woven highly religious allegory of personal salvation, that much is clear, but does the reader have to be blunted over the head with it? The lead player is named Christian? Really? Couldn't call him Bob? And his wife is Christina? You're joking, right? Pamela would've been better. The biggest surprise - and there are none - is that his children aren't named Christine, Christopher, and Jiminy Christmas. Also, did Bunyan HAVE to name everyone else exactly what they are in metaphor? I found that aggravating, and the slog-through was mighty difficult, and the sudden bursts of rhyme were ridiculous and often non-rhyming, but I'm all the richer for having read it, right? Wrong. Guess I'm going to hell.
    • 4/5
      Good and very readable allegory.
    • 1/5
      This has to be one of the most tedious books ever written. The imagery used such as the Slough of Despondency is great but that's about it. It's the second time I've read it and don't think I'll manage a third.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazingly helpful book for Christians. It's a reminder that we are on a constant journey which only began at the wicket gate and continues until our death. I'll be reading this again and again!
    • 3/5
      When I was in my early high school, I read Little Pilgrim's Progress and thought it was a quite a fun story with swords and battles and adventures. Reading the 'adult' version of the book has brought back memories as I try and align the two.
      This version was still quite readable and the first part of the book followed Christian as he journeyed to the wicket gate to start walking on the narrow path. He struggled with or fought of or was almost misled by various characters and trials. Each of the people was given a name that reflected their character, such as Faithful, Hopeful, Ignorance, Evangelist and Pliable.
      However, after passing through Vanity Fair and the Celestial Mountains, the story started to slow down with several lengthy theological explanations as they walked along. The end of the journey appeared suddenly and the characters walked a pretty easy path near the end, with not many challenges.
      And of course, in the end, they successfully reach heaven and are allowed to enter in.
      One thing that concerned me as I read was that the book was running out of pages to cover his wife's story. From what I recall, Little Pilgrim's Progress covers both Christian and Christiana's stories. According to Wikipedia, there is a second book that covers her story, although it is possible the edition I read was slightly abridged and did not include it.