I’ve been thinking about literary journeys, not so much content in literature, but in reading experience.
I started an interesting journey several years ago, and I’m wondering where it will go next. Ironically this literary journey starts with a DVD rental of Girl with the Pearl Earring. In one scene Griet (played by Scarlett Johansson) makes ultramarine paint. Although the image was striking, it struck me as wrong. I knew that the pigment, which at that time would have been made from lapis lazuli, was prohibitively expensive and an artist would not trust an assistant with it. When I went back and read the book, that’s exactly what I found. In Tracy Chevalier’s imagining, Vermeer entrusts Griet to get the pigment, but Vermeer makes the paint.
That scene got me thinking about pigment and making paint. I haven’t painted in years, but I still have an interest in obsession with painting. For years I’ve had an on-again-off-again habit of going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). So on my next trip I stopped in the technique section of the bookstore (I always left time to wander the bookstore.) and found a recently published book called Color, a Natural History of the Palette by a journalist named Victoria Finlay. Boy, was I in for a treat! Ms. Finlay’s journeys in search of various pigments is as enjoyable as the stories about the pigment. To this day, her chapter on the color orange is still my favorite.
As wonderful as the book was, I was not satisfied with the information. Rather, I was inflamed. Next I bought a copy of Bright Earth by Phillip Ball. He approaches the matter of pigment from a more scientific perspective, but even as a lay person I enjoyed it immensely. Afterward I went back to the Met’s bookstore in search of something else.
I found A Perfect Red, Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield, which is about the history of the dye made from cochineal. It was one of the biggest mysteries of its day. No one outside of the Spanish and native Mexicans who dealt in the trade knew what it was. The British, French and Dutch were anxious about finding out what it was and the book goes into great, delicious detail about the ways these would-be and successful spies went about discovering the secret.
From there my focus shifted. The politics arising from the cochineal prompted me to wonder about the Age of Exploration. I didn’t go back to Columbus although I might someday. I had been curious about Over the Edge of the World, Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen. At the top of my copy, there’s a quote form the New York Times Book Review: “It’s all here in wondrous detail….A first-rate historical page-turner.” The review wasn’t kidding. I had nightmares about the insects that got into the sailors’ hard tack for weeks. Hard tack is a tough little biscuit that stores well. It’s good for long sea journeys, but it’s liable to get infested with critters. The bouts of scurvy also made me cringe. What were humans doing trying to circle the globe like that? It amazes me that any ship from that expedition got back to Seville. But even a small amount of spice could set a regular sailor up for the rest of his life. And King Charles I (later Charles V, the Holy roman Emperor) needed to fund his wars.
So of course, I’m totally hooked on history about the sea. I remembered from A Perfect Red how Spain’s monopoly over cochineal led to several British letters of marque. So that led me to pirates and Under the Black Flag, the Romance and the Reality of Life Among Pirates by David Cordingly. I think I heard him interviewed on NPR, probably about the time the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. The book was another page-turner. No sooner was I done than I was scouring bookshelves (outside the Met) for my next pirate book. It had to be a pirate book.
I found The Pirate Queen, In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea. Initially I was really excited, but that didn’t last. The Pirate Queen was not strictly history; it was half memoir (I have nothing against memoir, but I was really in the mood for history), and the section on Grace O’Malley only takes up a small portion of the book. Once I got over that, I did enjoy the history Barbara Sjoholm discovered that I had no idea existed. It reminded me a lot about the feminist scholarship I was reading and reading about in college. Women may not fill the history books, but that doesn’t mean that they have an influence (whether small or large). Grace O’Malley was quite the terror of her time. Thankfully there is a nice bibliography at the back.
So where to go now? Granuaille: the Life and Times of Grace O’Malley seems a logical choice. I had heard Jane Yolen say at Wiscon 30 that she was working of a book about pirates. On her web site Sea Queens is tentatively scheduled to come out this fall from Charlesbridge Books. I certainly hope so. I recently read her story “A Knot of Toads” and realize that it’s been way too long since I’ve read Jane Yolen’s work. And there’s another book by David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History.
Then again, it’s summer, which means beach reading (or whatever equivalent there is in the Midwest). What next? Recommendations welcome.
