A year in books - or at least the beginning thereof

Ok well the title is slightly inaccurate but it gives the gist. A little over a year ago (more like a year and a half) a friend and I decided to challenge each other to read the same books from time to time. We are both completely unable to restrict ourselves to one book on the go so the basic idea was roughly once a month to finish the same book and discuss it. The only rules were that neither of us could have read the book before and we both had to agree the choice. We more or less took it in turns to choose the book. It worked swimmingly until we hit good old St Augstine who brought us to a grinding halt (or rather to our intellectual knees). We almost didn't recover. This update is to look back over the past year of reading.
So it all begin for some reason which I can't remember now I decided to start with Somerset Maugham - an author who had never previously really crossed my mind though Cosimo had read enough to think it might be of interest; and so we embarked upon Cakes and Ale. It seems ages ago now, but bits are still quite vivid. The characterisation is brilliant. Oddly it still has the power to shock even though the affairs probably have less power nowadays than at Maugham's time.
Then Cosimo decided that having owned the Scarlet Letter for years we ought to read it; a second consideration was that Cosimo thought it would be dry and difficult but that given it was arguably the first great American novel we ought to "assess its merits". I have to confess I was less than certain about this since for similar reasons I had been avoiding it for years. I was wrong to do so. It was one of the best books we have read in our oddly eclectic set of reading matter. One would be well advised not to read the ill fitting prologue which has nothing to do with anything really and is slow and annoying but once past that, the language, the characters, the depiction of the society draw you in. Both of us found it utterly compelling. I stayed up FAR too late reading it and was quite glad it wasn't term time when I was reading it. We both discovered that neither of us knew even vaguely what it was about, but I am not going to tell you here either because telling to much about it might ruin it (in the way that the person who wrote the description on the back of the Riders - the book we are currently reading has somewhat managed to do).
Before we embarked on The Scarlet Letter we promised ourselves something frivilous and frothy as a reward. Oddly enough it is more difficult to find light books to agree on than weighty tomes and also of course having read the Scarlet Letter we found we weren't quite so in need of something light, but by that time the decision had been made, and we embarked on the cheery world of Leave it to Psmith (Cosimo's choice - I had already read some Wodehouse and knew I liked him).
Leave it to Psmith doesn't actually leave a lot to discuss. It is great fun, and though definitely of its era, the humour doesn't tire. It is funnier than most contemporary books - at least by my sampling. Bits of it make you laugh out loud, and I think you would have to be in a really curmudgeonly mood not to enjoy it. That said the plot is merely a device to keep you turning the pages between the jokes and farcical situations. Still if anyone has a big cameleous hump as Kipling puts it Leave it to Psmith might be a good remedy.
Well this has begun us tiptoeing through the year. If I had kept the blog more up-to-date I might not being having such a big catch up to do, but that gives a taster of some of what we have been reading. Meanwhile I am off for a big bowl of home-made Scotch broth and then to follow the trail of a certain lost soul from Australia as he wends his way round Europe in Tim Winton's the Rider. The first three books we read are remarkably different from most of the ones this blog has dealt with to date. Maugham's Cakes and Ale did involve some travelling and restless souls but the focus was within England; Psmith is firmly entrenched in English soil and the Scarlet Letter just as deeply bound to America, so you see not all my reading involves voyaging but its still the blog of a book voyager.

Back from the brink

Well this blog has been more or less moribund for the last couple of months, thereby rather defeating the purpose in blogging, but I thought that today I would bring it back from the brink and write a wee bit more. It is not that the last two months have not been rather full of reading - indeed that has been part of the problem. I have been reading, marking and inwardly digesting on a vast array of topics, but finding precious little time to write.

In the last wee while we have continued plodding our way through the Americas with Clendinnen, Hemming, Townsend and co, reducing the once proud civilizations of the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas to rubble, following the Spanish as they trecked through the jungles of the Yucatan and up into the high Andes. We also took a foray away from the New World with the Jesuits to Japan. 

The story of the Christian century in Japan does not make happy reading, I have to say, and the final near-quashing of Christianity in Japan with the steady drive to force people to apostasize makes one stop and think. It has been a term reading all about encounters between different societies, but this caused me to stop and think more than many. There is a lot of heavy (and heavy going) primary and secondary material on this, but if people want to read a truly depressing novel on the subject, I can recommend Shusaku Endo's novel Silence. From Japan it was a short but not very cheerful hop across the Pacific to the New World, where we looked at the first Jesuit missionaries in New France and the horrors and difficulties of their experiences. If people are interested, the reports of the Jesuits in New France make fascinating reading, and give you a wealth of information on language, climate, people in a now lost world. At the same time, they too have their share of tragedy and torture. On this rather grimmer aspect, if anyone is looking for a cheerless evening in, I can recommend the film (or the book) Black Robe for the purpose. 

The cruelty that human can inflict on human seems to have been rather a dominant feature of reading lately and is not why I love history, nor what I seek to read for pleasure. The history of encounters seems to bring out the worst in humankind. Looking at current debates about the use of torture in interregotation you wonder whether the world ever changes.

On that melancholy note, it is not all cheerless. We have been reading about European ideas about the Nature of the North American Native through a range of books ranging from Pagden's Fall of Natural Man through Lestringant's Cannibals, to the Myth of the Savage, and in the midst of some truly weird and repellent theories you find throughout history, people defending the fact that "all mankind is one."

On a lighter note I cannot recommend Diana Wynne Jones' highly enough. I have been reading her books since I was a kid, and love them as much as ever. You travel with her through the pages of her books into new worlds; you are frequently forced to think, and as frequently made to laugh out loud - a good antedote to some of the other reading I have indulged in.

On which note, I had better leave the pages of the world wide web, and even the fantastical worlds of Diana Wynne Jones, and  instead journey with Richard Hakluyt to all the regions of the world that he could find out about, tracing travels through the pages of books. He collects narratives that display a sheer exuberance at the world out there. It can be a pleasure to voyage with him through the pages of a book.