The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
437 pages
Published 2020
Read from June 16 to June 23
Rating: 5 out of 5
This is easily one of my favorite books I've ever encountered.
Pretty much every review and article for this book has touched upon its immediate relevance to the world of 2020. Not long after it was published, New York City became the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Murders and countless other abuses continually committed by the police finally opened a powerful wellspring of popular rage against the injustices intrinsic to the American political and judicial system, rage answered in turn by further acceleration of authoritarianism and new abuses of power, astounding in their brazen disregard for the cellphone cameras and news crews recording every detail. The crawling eldritch horrors of white supremacy are fighting in the streets to maintain their strangehold on this land we inhabit, furious to lose even one concession, even one drop of power to those people. This novel might feel like a tome of prophecy, if one were a sheltered white ally unaware of the dictatorship of white supremacy within this country, and the tools of murder, genocide, economic strangulation, and terror it has employed against Black and Indigenous peoples since the 1400s. In reality, The City We Became is merely reportage, dressed in elements of fantasy.
The way Jemisin roots her extradimensional abominations in the real-life Lovecraft, who found his source of horror and revulsion in the diversity of American city life, is one of the most skilled and profound uses of genre, and the language of genre, I've ever read in fantasy fiction. 4Chan bigots and the NYPD exist as eager pawns of an eldritch agenda of genocide, grounding the tentacle horrors with far more real, far more insidious horrors of modern life, like doxxing, swatting, and sexual violence. This book gave me a deeper sense of dread than any horror fiction I've ever read.
But Jemisin must also be praised for her creation of the avatars of New York's boroughs. Without giving too much away, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan one and all possess the swagger and righteous fury of Jemisin's best work and most memorable characters. For every anxiety-inducing encounter with the forces of white supremacy's evil, there's an answering FUCK YES moment from one or more of the living embodiments of New York City. I'm not ashamed to say I nearly pumped my fist in the air on more than one occasion.
I'm blessed to have spent enough time in New York to have a general sense of its feel and its flavor, but even without that background, the love and energy poured into this book glimmers through. The City We Became is fucking amazing.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Monday, June 15, 2020
2020 read #4: Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, et al.
Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Sam Witwer
433 pages
Published 2018
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This is the first book I've managed to read in its entirety since January. First I got stuck in a book that I didn't feel like finishing, then I developed anxiety about COVID-19, then came lockdown and panic attacks and depression and having no time to myself, then came the massive protests and uprisings against white violence and police brutality. This has been a turbulent year, and it's led to my longest reading drought since 2012.
This volume was an easy avenue back into reading. It's an art book—well over half its length is filled with art, tracing the visual development of Dungeons & Dragons from its roots in wargaming to its popular current iteration. I first got into D&D back in 2016. During this age of quarantine, unable to attend even an online session, I've spent lots of time downloading and browsing through PDFs of volumes from older editions. The primitive artwork and DIY fanzine vibe of the earliest days of D&D in the 1970s is something I appreciate, and who doesn't love the bizarre perms sported by half-naked rangers all through the '80s and '90s? I loved lingering over the art collected here, and recommend it on that basis alone.
The text, by contrast, is mostly a fluff piece, reading at times like a glowing end-of-year report to shareholders. Deep-dive exposé this is not. Four white dudes collaborated on the text, which suggests why certain vital topics—such as how the artwork of the current edition has shifted markedly toward a more diverse cast of characters, and how this shift has occurred in tandem with growing diversity within the hobby itself, which might be illuminating material for a visual history—aren't mentioned even in passing. I love D&D, but I'm no shareholder, so the text failed to excite my interest.
433 pages
Published 2018
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This is the first book I've managed to read in its entirety since January. First I got stuck in a book that I didn't feel like finishing, then I developed anxiety about COVID-19, then came lockdown and panic attacks and depression and having no time to myself, then came the massive protests and uprisings against white violence and police brutality. This has been a turbulent year, and it's led to my longest reading drought since 2012.
This volume was an easy avenue back into reading. It's an art book—well over half its length is filled with art, tracing the visual development of Dungeons & Dragons from its roots in wargaming to its popular current iteration. I first got into D&D back in 2016. During this age of quarantine, unable to attend even an online session, I've spent lots of time downloading and browsing through PDFs of volumes from older editions. The primitive artwork and DIY fanzine vibe of the earliest days of D&D in the 1970s is something I appreciate, and who doesn't love the bizarre perms sported by half-naked rangers all through the '80s and '90s? I loved lingering over the art collected here, and recommend it on that basis alone.
The text, by contrast, is mostly a fluff piece, reading at times like a glowing end-of-year report to shareholders. Deep-dive exposé this is not. Four white dudes collaborated on the text, which suggests why certain vital topics—such as how the artwork of the current edition has shifted markedly toward a more diverse cast of characters, and how this shift has occurred in tandem with growing diversity within the hobby itself, which might be illuminating material for a visual history—aren't mentioned even in passing. I love D&D, but I'm no shareholder, so the text failed to excite my interest.
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