Reading Wednesday
Jan. 20th, 2016 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Teardrop Island: Following Victorian Footsteps Across Sri Lanka by Cherry Briggs. A nonfiction travel book about Sri Lanka. Since all travel books these days seem to need some sort of gimmick, Briggs's is that she's recreating the journey of James Emerson Tennent, who himself wrote a popular travel book about Sri Lanka in the 1840s. Briggs's one big benefit is that she happened to be traveling in 2010, immediately after the ceasefire of the civil war, making her the first outsider to visit some of these areas in decades. Overall it's a bit of a 101-level introduction to the country, but her writing is pleasant enough that it's worth reading. Recommended if you have a particular interest in the topic.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff. Ah, this book was really fantastic! A nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials (okay, you could probably guess that from the title) with plenty of social history all around – describing both the situation leading up to such a sudden outbreak of panic, and the way this singular event has been used and interpreted ever since it happened. Schiff focuses more on the trials themselves than on the witchcraft/possession/pretend visions/whatever you want to call it, which is a fair choice; as Schiff points out, cases of witchcraft were not uncommon, either before or after 1692, in both New England and Europe. The difference in this moment was how seriously the situation was regarded, and how many people were convicted (though curiously, no one who confessed hung; all 20 of the people who died did so protesting their innocence).
Schiff argues that a number of factors led to this panic: the frequent wars with Native Americans, which left many of the 'possessed' girls with what we would probably today call PTSD; the brand new charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the fact that many of the judges involved had a huge stake in making their government appear strong and efficient; the Puritan religious emphasis on control, confession, and writing.
It's also an impressively readable book, for such a thoroughly researched piece of history. It's got a page-turning quality to it, and there were bits that made me laugh out loud or read out to whoever was nearby. I would have liked some more information about why people made the choices they did, but of course Schiff is hampered by what survives of the contemporary record. This bit of history seems to have fared particularly poorly, with all the accidents that can happen in 400 years being compounded by some deliberate attempts to obfuscate matters, once the moment had passed and people began to realize they had not behaved well. Overall a really great book. It's not a historical event I'm particularly into, but I loved this.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. A novel (fiction! finally!) about Henry, a young slave in 1850s Kansas. He gets caught up in John Brown's crusade to end slavery, and when Brown mistakes him for a girl, he's too intimidated to say otherwise. And then Brown decides "Henrietta" is his new good luck charm – nicknaming him "Onion" – so Henry becomes his newest follower. This leads to various escapades – joining a brothel, meeting Frederick Douglass in Boston and Harriet Tubman in Canada, and finally taking part in the raid on Harper's Ferry – despite Onion's total lack of interest in fighting or working or doing anything, really, other than feeding himself and drinking. Because despite the potentially serious subject matter, this is mostly a comedy. The main attraction is Onion's voice, full of slang and irony and a blunt matter-of-factness:
But what he lacked in size, Pa made up for with his voice. My Pa could outyell with his voice any white man who ever walked God’s green earth, bar none. He had a high, thin voice. When he talked, it sounded like he had a Jew’s harp stuck down his throat, for he spoke in pops and bangs and such, which meant speaking with him was a two-for-one deal, being that he cleaned your face and spit-washed it for you at the same time—make that three-for-one, when you consider his breath. His breath smelled like hog guts and sawdust, for he worked in a slaughterhouse for many years, so most colored folks avoided him generally.
But white folks liked him fine. Many a night I seen my Pa fill up on joy juice and leap atop the bar at Dutch Henry’s, snipping his scissors and hollering through the smoke and gin, “The Lord’s coming! He’s a’comin’ to gnash out your teeth and tear out your hair!” then fling hisself into a crowd of the meanest, low-down, piss-drunk Missouri rebels you ever saw. And while they mostly clubbed him to the floor and kicked out his teeth, them white fellers didn’t no more blame my Pa for flinging hisself at them in the name of the Holy Ghost than if a tornado was to come along and toss him across the room, for the Spirit of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood was serious business out on the prairie in them days, and your basic white pioneer weren’t no stranger to the notion of hope. Most of ’em was fresh out of that commodity, having come west on a notion that hadn’t worked out the way it was drawed up anyway, so anything that helped them outta bed to kill off Indians and not drop dead from ague and rattlesnakes was a welcome change.
The various Heroes of American History and Important Events that Onion witnesses are given no more respect than his father received. The whole thing reminded me of Huckleberry Finn, from the first-person telling by a funny, mischievous little boy to the similar sidewise perspective on race and war told through a series of adventures and avoidance. It's ultimately a tragedy (how could a book about the Harper's Ferry raid be anything else), but it's just so much fun to read that I kept waiting to read it out loud, just for the sheer rhythm and comedy of Onion's narration. It's a totally new take on telling this story that I really enjoyed. Highly recommended.
What are you currently reading?
Once Upon a Marquess by Courtney Milan. Her new historical! Yay!
Also, man, I still have that 2015 Reading Roundup meme I want to do. I forgot about it! Hopefully I will manage to finish it before February.
The Teardrop Island: Following Victorian Footsteps Across Sri Lanka by Cherry Briggs. A nonfiction travel book about Sri Lanka. Since all travel books these days seem to need some sort of gimmick, Briggs's is that she's recreating the journey of James Emerson Tennent, who himself wrote a popular travel book about Sri Lanka in the 1840s. Briggs's one big benefit is that she happened to be traveling in 2010, immediately after the ceasefire of the civil war, making her the first outsider to visit some of these areas in decades. Overall it's a bit of a 101-level introduction to the country, but her writing is pleasant enough that it's worth reading. Recommended if you have a particular interest in the topic.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff. Ah, this book was really fantastic! A nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials (okay, you could probably guess that from the title) with plenty of social history all around – describing both the situation leading up to such a sudden outbreak of panic, and the way this singular event has been used and interpreted ever since it happened. Schiff focuses more on the trials themselves than on the witchcraft/possession/pretend visions/whatever you want to call it, which is a fair choice; as Schiff points out, cases of witchcraft were not uncommon, either before or after 1692, in both New England and Europe. The difference in this moment was how seriously the situation was regarded, and how many people were convicted (though curiously, no one who confessed hung; all 20 of the people who died did so protesting their innocence).
Schiff argues that a number of factors led to this panic: the frequent wars with Native Americans, which left many of the 'possessed' girls with what we would probably today call PTSD; the brand new charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the fact that many of the judges involved had a huge stake in making their government appear strong and efficient; the Puritan religious emphasis on control, confession, and writing.
It's also an impressively readable book, for such a thoroughly researched piece of history. It's got a page-turning quality to it, and there were bits that made me laugh out loud or read out to whoever was nearby. I would have liked some more information about why people made the choices they did, but of course Schiff is hampered by what survives of the contemporary record. This bit of history seems to have fared particularly poorly, with all the accidents that can happen in 400 years being compounded by some deliberate attempts to obfuscate matters, once the moment had passed and people began to realize they had not behaved well. Overall a really great book. It's not a historical event I'm particularly into, but I loved this.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. A novel (fiction! finally!) about Henry, a young slave in 1850s Kansas. He gets caught up in John Brown's crusade to end slavery, and when Brown mistakes him for a girl, he's too intimidated to say otherwise. And then Brown decides "Henrietta" is his new good luck charm – nicknaming him "Onion" – so Henry becomes his newest follower. This leads to various escapades – joining a brothel, meeting Frederick Douglass in Boston and Harriet Tubman in Canada, and finally taking part in the raid on Harper's Ferry – despite Onion's total lack of interest in fighting or working or doing anything, really, other than feeding himself and drinking. Because despite the potentially serious subject matter, this is mostly a comedy. The main attraction is Onion's voice, full of slang and irony and a blunt matter-of-factness:
But what he lacked in size, Pa made up for with his voice. My Pa could outyell with his voice any white man who ever walked God’s green earth, bar none. He had a high, thin voice. When he talked, it sounded like he had a Jew’s harp stuck down his throat, for he spoke in pops and bangs and such, which meant speaking with him was a two-for-one deal, being that he cleaned your face and spit-washed it for you at the same time—make that three-for-one, when you consider his breath. His breath smelled like hog guts and sawdust, for he worked in a slaughterhouse for many years, so most colored folks avoided him generally.
But white folks liked him fine. Many a night I seen my Pa fill up on joy juice and leap atop the bar at Dutch Henry’s, snipping his scissors and hollering through the smoke and gin, “The Lord’s coming! He’s a’comin’ to gnash out your teeth and tear out your hair!” then fling hisself into a crowd of the meanest, low-down, piss-drunk Missouri rebels you ever saw. And while they mostly clubbed him to the floor and kicked out his teeth, them white fellers didn’t no more blame my Pa for flinging hisself at them in the name of the Holy Ghost than if a tornado was to come along and toss him across the room, for the Spirit of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood was serious business out on the prairie in them days, and your basic white pioneer weren’t no stranger to the notion of hope. Most of ’em was fresh out of that commodity, having come west on a notion that hadn’t worked out the way it was drawed up anyway, so anything that helped them outta bed to kill off Indians and not drop dead from ague and rattlesnakes was a welcome change.
The various Heroes of American History and Important Events that Onion witnesses are given no more respect than his father received. The whole thing reminded me of Huckleberry Finn, from the first-person telling by a funny, mischievous little boy to the similar sidewise perspective on race and war told through a series of adventures and avoidance. It's ultimately a tragedy (how could a book about the Harper's Ferry raid be anything else), but it's just so much fun to read that I kept waiting to read it out loud, just for the sheer rhythm and comedy of Onion's narration. It's a totally new take on telling this story that I really enjoyed. Highly recommended.
What are you currently reading?
Once Upon a Marquess by Courtney Milan. Her new historical! Yay!
Also, man, I still have that 2015 Reading Roundup meme I want to do. I forgot about it! Hopefully I will manage to finish it before February.
