current reading

This photograph may be taken as evidence that I have gone too far in my concurrent reading during bouts of insomnia, not least because it doesn’t even include book number seven, the newly published U.S. edition of Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under the Nazi Occupation. I didn’t plan to do this; the books fell off the pile one at a time, or suddenly seemed interesting, or in the case of the Hinton paperback, arrived as a review copy.

Except for the very hip but deliberately functional StyleCity guide, which is a useful reminder of how Turkey defined its position in global culture circa 2005, all of the books are what used to be called gripping reads, even when read ten or twenty pages at a time. Even Hinton’s anthology, which I plan to review separately at some point, is a historical narrative as well as the best English translation of the classical Chinese poets that I’ve ever read.

And having noticed the books thus scattered, I realize that all of them, the Paris one included, are about my favorite topics: zones of cultural collision, where one’s own values cannot be taken for granted because they are being contested by a dominant power, or influenced by economic factors, or challenged by different beliefs; zones in which the rules of the game are changing rapidly, or have already changed beyond reversal, or are being stubbornly defended by the respective sides for their own reasons.

And given the importance of bird of paradise feathers in the royal court of Nepal and in that of the Ottoman Empire, and the sheer extent of the Aru Island pearl trade over the centuries, it seems likely that at least some of the participants mentioned in all of these books had been in the same city, if not the same building, with objects originating in the islands, if not in the particular Backshore (technical term) island described by the anthropologist; a place that abandoned local religion only in the 1970s by government edict to choose one of the Five Faiths of Indonesia. They picked Catholicism because it provided more free clothing and religious items than the others who were competing.

There is a small section of Photoshop manipulation in this image, but any who can find it have entirely too much time on their hands. It isn’t a piece of trickery or a visual joke, just a deletion of something minor from a book cover.