Throwback Saturday- Journey to the Maquasen and Sinnekens

A post from 2010, when I was recovering from a sprained ankle and doing a bit of reading:

As a native of New York City and an almost-history major in college, I am sometimes astounded by what I never learned in my Bronx school education.

Until finding a certain book called "Journey into Mohawk Country" by Messrs. Van den Bogaert and O'Connor, I never knew that a certain Harmen Mayndertsz van den Bogaert had written a diary of his journey from New Amsterdam [New York City] to Ft.Orange [Albany] accompanied by two Dutch and five Maquasen Indians [Mohawk] taking approximately five weeks, during December of 1634 and January of 1635.

His mission?  To find out why the Mohawk were abandoning their beaver fur trade with the Dutch in favor of trading with the French.

Until I had traveled in September, 2010 to Stillwater and Ft. Ticonderoga (and Lake George Village), New York, I had not paid much attention to the history preceding the French and Indian War.  Now, I seem to be running into it everywhere.

The YA version of this book was actually a graphic novel.  But like the old Classics Illustrated comics, this graphic novel may lead readers to the original book.  For me, it was a good read while I was nursing my sprained ankle.

This was raw travel.   Van den Bogaert and his traveling companions would not have made it to Ft. Orange had it not been for the hospitality of the Maquasen and Sinnekens [a general word for Native Americans west of the Mohawk, but used here to describe the Oneida].   They traded tools and weapons for the Native hospitality. They slept in longhouses, tried a couple of times to heal sick Native Americans at their hosts' request, and unsuccessfully tried to purchase a "tame" bear as a traveling companion.  They feasted on bear, dried salmon, and hare cooked with chestnuts.

That's true adventure of a type that is hard to come by in the East today.  Thinking that Van den Bogaert wasn't much older than my son was in 2010 when Van den Bogaert made this journey, I conclude that this type of adventure is denied our young people.  I sometimes wonder if my son would have leapt at the chance to make this journey.  I suspect he would have.

Will I try to tackle the source document?  Not sure [and, as of 2018, I haven't].  But I loved the graphic novel.

Thank you, George O'Connor, and the other people involved in adapting this journal to the graphic novel format.

For the Love of Reading

For the Author Blog Challenge I am participating in, yesterday's prompt was:

How do the things you read impact your writing? What do you love to read? What do you avoid reading at all costs? How would your writing change if you read more of the things you typically avoid?

I avoided this prompt yesterday but it kept gnawing at me - so today I am going to have two posts.  One, on this prompt, and one, my regular Wednesday Spring Things features.

I probably will not be following the prompts the next several days.  Thursday, June 7 and Friday, June 8, are the 9 month anniversary of the great Binghamton, NY flood of September 7 and 8, 2011, thanks to Tropical Storm Lee.  I use the monthly anniversaries to track the progress of the recovery of my neighborhood (one of the neighborhoods badly impacted) and the Binghamton area.  Saturday, June 9, is my Sustainable Saturday feature and Sunday, June 10, is my Civil War Sunday.  I will use these "days with a purpose" to (hopefully) improve my writing skills, and I hope you will join me.


What I love to read:


1.  My first love is nonfiction, and if I do end up writing a book, I suspect it will be something along the non fiction line.  Examples of books I have enjoyed in recent years:

Freakanomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  They write about "The Hidden Side of Human Nature".  I loved their unexpected takes on "accepted facts", or what you might also call "Everything You Thought You Know is Wrong."

Outliers-The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Who would have thought that success in sports depended so much on your birthday?  Or exactly why was young Bill Gates in the right place at the right time?

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places on Earth by Eric Weiner.  Another "it's not what you think" book.  Come to think of it, that seems to be a theme of my non fiction reading.


2. Alternate history (what if the Axis powers won World War II?  What if.....) including these favorites:


The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick.  
The Gladiator, by Harry Turtledove (YA fiction).
The Worldwar series and Colonization series (which are related), by Harry Turtledove.

Why alternate history?  Because I was originally a history major in college.  And I do enjoy a good "what if", if well written and richly researched.


3.  Dystopian fiction, mostly YA.  My prize find was The Hunger Games, which I read not long after it came out and long before the entire world discovered it. (Truthfully, I was not near as thrilled by the two sequels.)  I love seeing how each author meets the challenge of creating a world and allowing you in, and making you feel, even after you put the book down, that you belong in that world.  You can't wait to reenter it.

Other favorites, not strictly dystopian, include:


The Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld
Rot and Ruin and its sequel Dust and Decay by Jonathan Maberry.

Rot and Ruin contains what I think is one of the best opening lines of any book I've ever read:  "Benny Imura couldn't hold a job, so he took to killing."  

Yes, these two Jonathan Maberry books are zombie lit, but...don't sell zombie lit short. 

In a way, it's too bad that dystopian literature has become so popular but - that's a subject for another post.

What do I avoid?  Romance. (well, I do read an occasional romance in Good Housekeeping magazine, but that's about it.) Anything that sounds like a textbook.  And (this may horrify some people in the Challenge) poetry. Except for some Robert Frost.  Would my writing change if I read these genres?  I truly don't know.

What I do know is that I am paying more attention now to books I read, to discover (in books that work for me), why they work.  I need to read more to learn to write better and I need to pay more attention to the inner workings of those books.  But I will still read for pleasure, and I always will.


If you are an author-when you read for pleasure, do you find yourself dissecting books?  Or do you just - read?

 
 







 

Supermoon, Meteors and Life as We Knew It

Saturday is the Cinco de Mayo- time for parties, Mexican food, and, this year, a supermoon.

The supermoon is the full moon when the moon is closest to the Earth.  It normally comes in April or May.

The annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower will be hitting its peak at the same time, Saturday.  Hmmmm.

Does this sound like a plot for a YA series?  For example, what would happen if one of those meteors hit this supermoon?  Things wouldn't go well for the Earth, no doubt.  The moon controls the tides, and a lot of other things, too.  The moon isn't just a pretty ball in the sky that goes through phases every 28 days.

If you are ready to grab onto this theme, too late.  A YA series has already been written on this theme by an upstate New York author, Susan Beth Pfeffer.  And, SPOILER ALERT.  it ain't a pretty story. 

The three books are:
Life As We Knew It
The Dead and the Gone (hints at what happened in book #1, doesn't it?)
this world we live in

Pretty spooky, that this meteor/supermoon thing should come in the middle of me reading this series, which explores What Happens If A Large Meteor Hits the Moon One Night in May.  I'm going to spend a very uneasy Cinco de Mayo evening.

I actually started (without knowing it was part of a series) reading the third and final book, "this world we live in".  What I loved about it is that I was able to immediately plunge into the story although I didn't know a single thing about the first two books.  Within pages, I was hooked so badly I would resent it if I was interrupted.   That's the experience I want from a good read.

This is what I loved the most about the third book:

1.  The characters were people.  They fought (a lot).  The teen heroine had grown through adversity but was far from a saint.  Especially at the end (double spoiler alert)
2.  I felt the natural disasters were plausible as a result of the meteor hit - but since this isn't a "science fiction book" I wasn't expecting hard science.  Nor did I get hard science.
3.  Religion played a part in the book.  In most YA fiction I've read (unless the book is explicitly Christian literature) I normally haven't found much in the way of religion.  Here, characters pray, characters hold church at home, and one main character is a deeply devout Catholic.  I'm glad the book took time to explore what might happen to religious belief in the aftermath of a huge natural disaster.  Not because I'm especially religious (I'm not) but religion is part of the human experience.

This is what I didn't like:
1. The book jacket flaps gave away the entire plot!

Interestingly, in Goodreads reviews,, I found a lot of people were very disappointed with this third book because it didn't continue the growth of the first two books. So perhaps I should be happy that I read the last book first.  Now that I'm reading the first book, I'm sorry, in a way, that I know the fates of some of the main characters.  And I do agree the first book is better than the third.

But I look forward even more to the second book, which takes place in my native New York City. 

Are you looking forward to some moon and meteor shower watching on Cinco de Mayo?