Books, and other bits and pieces

[dolorosa_12]

I'm feeling a bit tired and run down, but I made a massive pot of congee, wrapped up in lots of soft, woollen clothing, and am otherwise doing what I can to regain energy levels. I did at least manage to get my sign-up and letter sorted for once_upon_fic, and I'm going to have a look back through the entries on halfamoon and make a recs post at some point next week.


This week has been slow in terms of reading, but I have managed to finish one nonfiction book, and two short stories. The nonfiction book was a popular history book about the early Spanish colonists of the American continents (Conquistadores by Fernando Cervantes), and although it did discuss the greed, incompetence and vicious brutality towards the indigenous peoples and nations the colonists wrought, the focus was in the main on the religious dimension of the colonisation. It suffers in the way that most histories of similar periods of history suffer, in that the author lacks, for the most part, written sources from the colonised peoples, and has to mine the distorted written records of the colonising perspective, reading between the lines to try to get a picture of the period. This was not a time or place that I knew much about — when it comes to the history of modern/early modern colonisation, I'm much more familiar with what went on in Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East and North Africa — and that's partly why I picked the book up. As a broad-brush overview it was fine, but I would have been more interested in a book more focused on the pre-colonial peoples rather than the major figures who colonised this region.

In a wild swerve in terms of reading material, I then read the latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I'm finding that I like the approach of this particular SFF short fiction magazine — each issue has two short stories, and they tend to have a common thematic element. The focus in this case was stories about pilgrimages that are also quests, and also transformative — inner and outer journeys that give and take something from the traveller. The first story — 'A Sin for Freedom' (Eboni J. Dunbar) is a pilgramge-like journey of repentence, with characters struggling with the conflict between freedom and responsibility, love and duty. Although the religion within the world of the story is invented, to me it had a somewhat Christian sensibility when it came to how it conceived of repentence and repair. The second story — 'What the Mountain Takes, What the Mountain Offers' (Jae Steinbacher) follows a character on a pilgrimage-like journey of supplication, seeking healing from sickness.

The main result of reading those two short stories is that they inspired me to do another reread of my favourite-ever 'two damaged people go on a transformative journey that ends up being an inner and outer journey at once' story, Pagan's Daughter by Catherine Jinks. I had been planning to do a reread of the whole series (of which this is the fifth and final book) but I wasn't in the mood for the first four, but this has given me the push I needed to just skip the first four and read the book I actually wanted to read right now!

I feel like this post is getting more rambly than usual (probably a result of my exhausted fuzzy head), so I will end things here for now.

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

*unrequested book recommendation forthcoming*

It suffers in the way that most histories of similar periods of history suffer, in that the author lacks, for the most part, written sources from the colonised peoples… I would have been more interested in a book more focused on the pre-colonial peoples rather than the major figures who colonised this region. Have I got a book for you! There IS actually a surprisingly large number of Mexica documents that, essentially, no one has bothered to translate or digitize until very, very recently. If you want a more pop history, I think Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun is a really good example of the type. It has one major flaw, which is that it does a little Jared Diamonding that I find irritating, but its whole raison d'être is present these newly available-to-scholars materials to a non-expert audience, and it does that well. It starts precolonial, and then covers the first decade or so of the colonial encounter in Mexico.

If you want more specific insights and/or a more explicitly scholarly approach to that general place and period, she has a peer-reviewed book with Stanford UP that I recommend, with a narrower focus: Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley.

In any case, I hope those energy levels rise back up soon!

[dolorosa_12]

Unsolicited book recs are always welcome here! My university's library has ebook access to Fifth Sun and a print copy of Here in This Year so I should definitely be able to read them both. I was hoping someone would chime in with knowledge of the subject so what you're saying is really helpful to me.

I'm being somewhat unfair on the author of the book that sparked all this, since I'm complaining that he focused on something that I didn't want him to focus on! (It's a very 'great men' way of writing about history, even if the men in question are rightly depicted as terrible people who committed atrocities.) But he kept flagging up the inadequacy of his (contemporary Spanish) sources and saying that the way they depicted indigenous peoples was distorted by their specific preoccupations and biases, but giving the impression that these were the only sources available. It's a real problem in my former academic discipline that scholars don't have good language skills in German and French (and to a lesser extent modern Irish and Welsh), and I would assume it's a similar problem if historians specialising in the study of the colonial encounter between Spanish colonists and peoples in the American continents can read Spanish but not indigenous languages, or don't have access to relevant digitised material, as you say.

In any case, thank you for the book recs!

[merit]

When I reflect on the history education I received in school, there was extremely minimal on the Americas. The USA was noted mainly because of how they intersected with AU colonialism and eventual 'self-rule' and of course during WWI and WWII. Somewhat during the Cold War and Vietnam War and I'm generally noting a trend here...

I'm going to try to keep up with current SFF subscriptions before starting another, however thank you for the recommendation.

[dolorosa_12]

Same here! We were taught US history in relation to the two world wars and the Cold War, and because we studied decolonisation history of specific countries in Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Indian subcontinent), we learnt about the US involvement in these places if it was relevant, but nothing about American history itself, and certainly nothing about any country in North or South America other than the US. My final years in high school overlapped with the September 11 attacks and the early stages of the 'war on terror,' so my history teacher modified the curriculum slightly to include the recent history of Afghanistan, but that wouldn't have happened if the attacks hadn't taken place. I learnt a bit about Chile because we studied House of the Spirits for my English/World Literature class in high school. But history as taught to Australian school students focuses much more heavily on Europe, and then on the Asia-Pacific region, which does make sense, but means we have to find out about other places on our own if we're interested...

There is certainly a overabundance of SFF short fiction, so I don't blame you for limiting yourself to current subscriptions!