November Nonfiction II

By -

It's the second week of Nonfiction November, and here is my second entry, much more on time than the first:


 Book Pairing with Katie at Doing Dewey: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.

 

I think this year I will make a somewhat unusual choice.  At the last Spin, my title was the Popol Vuh, the Mayan book of scripture, history, and legend.   While the general understanding of non-fiction is that it's factual, or at least somebody's opinion, mythology counts too, and I enjoyed the Popol Vuh so much.  Here's a short paragraph from my post about it:

One and Seven Hunahpu are ballplayers, gamblers, and adventurers.  They go to Xibalba (the underworld of death) and are defeated and killed by the Xibalbans, but magically impregnate a daughter of the underworld.  The resulting twins are Hunahpu and Xbalanque -- also ballplayer, but hunters too, and they are able to defeat the Xibalbans and impose some safety on the world.

 And, I just started a novel that so happens to draw on Mayan myth for its story.   It's Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Morena-Garcia.  I'm about a third of the way through this YA novel, so I don't know yet if it's going to be really good, or a dud (One strike against it: it uses the dreaded X of Y and Z title formula!  One in favor: I really like the cover).   So far I'm interested.  Here's the summary:

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own.  Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother...

So.  It's the 1920s, and our girl is going to travel across Mexico and through Mayan myth to accomplish her quest.  Hun-Kamé, Lord of Xibalba, is her partner, looking to defeat his brother, Vucub-Kamé  (Hun-Kamé being One Death, I presume that Vucub-Kamé is Seven Death, in keeping with the naming system I learned about in the Popol Vuh).  I hope it's a good story!

Comments

  1. Jenny @ Reading the EndNovember 11, 2021 at 3:55 AM

    Oh I hope you enjoy! I had a lot of fun with Gods of Jade and Shadow just by virtue of its being a road trip book, which I can never resist. The worldbuilding was great too, but gosh I was so thrilled to be reading a road trip book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. shelleyrae @ book'd outNovember 11, 2021 at 6:40 PM

    What an interesting pair, thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LoryNovember 12, 2021 at 11:43 AM

    Nice pairing! Even though I have sworn never to read another X of Y and Z book, I'd consider this one. It does sound too interesting to pass up. And good on you to have gone to the source for the mythology. Hope it will turn out to be all you hope for.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Emma at Words And Peace / France Book ToursNovember 13, 2021 at 9:15 AM

    Fascinating theme, I really want to know more about this theme.
    Here is my post: https://wordsandpeace.com/2021/11/08/nonfiction-november-2021-book-pairings/

    ReplyDelete
  5. curlygeek04November 13, 2021 at 9:56 AM

    I loved Gods of Jade and Shadow, I hope you do too! It's a bit of a formulaic "quest" story but I loved the mythology. It sounds like I should read the book you paired with it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. DoingDeweyNovember 25, 2021 at 8:20 AM

    Ha! It does always surprise me that myths and religion make it into the nonfiction section and I love that you've used that in your pairing. These books seem like they'd go perfectly together.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more