2018 read #8: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
449 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 21 to March 23
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

One unsettling realization I've had over the last couple years is the likelihood that, if I had been born black, I wouldn't be alive today. On at least two occasions in my teens, off the top of my head, police drew guns on me. The first was when my father and I were in rural Idaho one snowy night. Like many other paranoid people, my father had a police scanner, which he purchased in hopes of keeping tabs on the vast governmental conspiracy to harass him. (When the airwaves were conspicuously silent in this regard, he shifted the goalposts: They used frequencies unavailable to commercial scanners, and then later They used the internet.) This one night, we overhead a police dispatcher relaying an exact description of my father's station wagon, advising all units to be alert for it, as it was used in an armed robbery of a jewelry store. Within minutes, despite the remoteness of the road, we were pulled over by a swarm of cops and ordered, rather violently, to exit the vehicle with hands in the air. The second occasion was when my father and I, homeless, spent an ill-considered night in a city park. Uneasy and unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, I dimly became aware of lights and voices approaching. Soon enough, a patrol car arrived, and I was ordered to show my hands and not move. These were scary situations for a white boy; had I been black, I can all too easily imagine how events could have taken a far bloodier turn. And that's not even getting into the desperate two days I spent hitchhiking in order to finally get away from my father when I was 18.

White Americans, for the most part, are wholly insulated from the realities of being black in this country. Most of them, in fact, violently resist even the slightest attempt at education -- just witness the vitriol flung at "social justice warriors" and the very concept of privilege. Or, for that matter, witness the Electoral College appointment of Donald J. Trump. Books like White Rage should be required reading in high schools and colleges, yet instead white parents get fragile and violent should their precious Aryan snowflakes be exposed to the idea of privilege in public school. Social change takes generations, but it can be hard to stay optimistic for the future when such a substantial cohort of enraged white authoritarians have essentially taken over government at all levels, despite being a minority of voters.

I'm hardly exempt from the general white tendency toward ignorance. My own social justice awakening, such as it is, has been a gradual climb from soft, toothless Democratic Party liberalism. As recently as 2005, I wrote pieces on my blog about how affirmative action just wasn't fair, and how what society should be striving for was equality. It's cringe-inducing to recall, but it's important to remind myself that I will never truly be a "perfect" ally; I'll always have a lot of growing to do. I mean, even now, I scarcely know (on a personal level) more than a handful of people of color.

Many words have been written about the power and grace of The Hate U Give. Thomas' elegant and absorbing prose and excellent story are worthy in and of themselves, and might perhaps get lost in the importance of the book's didacticism and its message. As for those latter two attributes, Hate should join White Rage on must-read lists around the nation, a narrative illustration of the litany of horrors given in the latter book. All of us, not just the reactive right, need to seek out the stories and realities of the black experience. I'm just getting started, but luckily these two books have been a great place to begin.

2018 read #7: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany.

The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany
242 pages
Published 1924
Read from February 22 to March 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This book had been on my must-read list for a number of years. Early modern fantasy often gets overlooked, as if the genre sprang fully formed from the pen of Tolkien in 1937, but I've always been drawn to origins and primordial stages of evolution. As a would-be fantasist myself, there's an appeal to discovering lost phyla from the genre's early diversification, before the success of Tolkien encouraged so many imitators. Of course, there are any number of good reasons for why only the crunchiest of nerdlings discuss the likes of Lord Dunsany, as I was doomed to discover here.

Lord Dunsany was primarily a short story writer, and it shows in the episodic chapters, strings of vignettes connected by repetitive and unnecessary padding. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I claim that a good editor could salvage an excellent story from this book by trimming about 80% of its bulk. My favorite passages deal with the moor-witch Ziroonderel, whether relating how she casts a stupendous sword that unites the magic of runes with the science of meteorite metal, or having her give a climactic speech that delivers the book's thesis statement: "And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended." It is a generational truism that any younger demographic might apply to their elders, but which feels especially apropos when a generation that congratulated itself for decades about Woodstock votes in a fascist.

Ziroonderel is the most interesting part of the book, but the rest of it wouldn't be so bad... if, again, one could trim it down to about fifty pages. Because fifty pages is pretty much all the story there is. The rest repeats, with minor variations, motifs of getting to, leaving, and wishing to return to Elfland, or longing to return to Earth once there; the second half of the novel bogs down in an endless cycle of unicorn hunting, which my Beagle-nurtured sentiments found almost obscene. Dunsany attempts to emulate heroic poetry in his prose, but his attempts pretty much amount to repeating a few set phrases every few paragraphs. I would not be surprised if an analysis revealed that "the fields we know" comprised no less than 10% of the total word count. It's no wine-dark sea, let's say that much.

In the end, I'm glad I struggled through Elfland. A few rare moments of genuine magic shone through the dross of Dunsany's aimless wanderings in search of an editor. But I'm gonna have to put off any attempt to read MacDonald's Phantastes for a while. I'm gonna need to read some books from the age of efficient storytelling, first.