after the midwives i listened to ginzburg's the cheese and the worms which is mostly composed of the inquisition transcripts of a man named menocchio who believed in god just a little bit too differently so the catholic church imprisoned n tortured him
for a long time my favorite historical torture method was the strappado, but the transcripts state that's what they did to him n he was begging for mercy n now i kinda feel like the strappado has been ruined for me. i like menocchio
after that i listened to african samurai, which is about yasuke, the 6 ft black dude who went with the jesuit to japan n got hired on by nobunaga. love hearing about the catholic church child trafficking (better to sell japan's war orphans to chinese christian's for sexual abuse than to leave them in their home country as pagans). interesting book. i liked hearing about the asian pirate fleets n how they consisted of portuguese, african, chinese, and japanese people...
after that i listened to secondhand time which was oral history from random citizens about the collapse of the soviet union. nice mix of "we just wanted salami n blue jeans" "they murdered my azerbaijani husband because i was armenian and i fled to moscow" "my daughter was murdered in chechnya" "i made a lot of money smuggling stuff in from italy"
over 90 books now this yr
listening to meditations by aurelius