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.
