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Book Meme - Day 10
Aug. 19th, 2010 11:18 amDay 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Well, since I don't usually read books that I don't think are going to interest me one way or the other, I'll go with one I'd to read at the university:
Naufragios y comentarios
Written by Álver Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, this book tells the story of a shipwreck in Florida in the first half of the 16th Century, and the journey the author made from there to what today is the state of Sinaloa, México. That's a lot of territory to cover.
Naufragios has adventure, con men, mystery, legends, lots and lots of descriptions of the natural landscape, cannibalism (the Conquistadores eating each other) and it's based on a true story. The author was one of the two people who survived the ordeal. There's even a movie about it. I haven't seen it, but I do know that it ventures more into Fiction Land.
The reason I thought I wouldn't like it is that all the other texts in that class--which was the first texts written in America by Spaniards--were boring and long and arid and... bleh, since they were supposed to be accurate recounts of what the Conquistadores found. For one, they'd to be careful about what they said because of the Inquisition, and they applied their Western European world view in their texts so hard it wasn't funny. And we had to tell apart what they saw and what they thought they saw (Columbus calls a manatee a mermaid and there's a point in another text where an Amerindian pyramid is called a pagoda, for example.)
TL;DR: that class was too much history in my literary studies. :x
( The rest of the questions/prompts )
Well, since I don't usually read books that I don't think are going to interest me one way or the other, I'll go with one I'd to read at the university:
Written by Álver Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, this book tells the story of a shipwreck in Florida in the first half of the 16th Century, and the journey the author made from there to what today is the state of Sinaloa, México. That's a lot of territory to cover.
Naufragios has adventure, con men, mystery, legends, lots and lots of descriptions of the natural landscape, cannibalism (the Conquistadores eating each other) and it's based on a true story. The author was one of the two people who survived the ordeal. There's even a movie about it. I haven't seen it, but I do know that it ventures more into Fiction Land.
The reason I thought I wouldn't like it is that all the other texts in that class--which was the first texts written in America by Spaniards--were boring and long and arid and... bleh, since they were supposed to be accurate recounts of what the Conquistadores found. For one, they'd to be careful about what they said because of the Inquisition, and they applied their Western European world view in their texts so hard it wasn't funny. And we had to tell apart what they saw and what they thought they saw (Columbus calls a manatee a mermaid and there's a point in another text where an Amerindian pyramid is called a pagoda, for example.)
TL;DR: that class was too much history in my literary studies. :x
( The rest of the questions/prompts )
