Books, and other bits and pieces
Feb. 9th, 2023 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'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 ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.
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.