The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
535 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 13 to March 27
Rating: 4 out of 5
It's been a long time since I read a novel this lengthy. The Lord of the Rings doesn't count; I'd read that one several times before, so it was a fond revisit rather than a fresh read. Turns out the last book I read approaching this one in wordcount was Lauren Owen's The Quick, all the way back in October 2019, several tumultuous lifetimes ago.
For a while now, I've been reading and writing mostly short form pieces: short stories, flash, quite a bit of poetry. Concurrently, my ADHD (and my attention span in general) has been more of a struggle than it used to be. I've been trying to get back into reading novels, but have been intimidated by the proverbial fantasy doorstops that I used to enjoy. It's difficult to maintain any reasonable reading pace when the 50 or so pages I can manage on an average day barely make a dent in the page-count.
I'm having to refamiliarize myself with the pacing of longer books. On one hand, it's luxurious when a book has room to indulge in detailed worldbuilding and scene-setting, spending time with mood and vibes rather than rushing between plot points. On the other, The City of Brass spends much of its bulk establishing a norm for its characters and the titular city's political machinations, only to scuttle it in the last couple chapters. At times I felt a bit of the sprawl could've been trimmed without losing much in the way of character detail or sense of place.
That said, the sense of place in this book is astounding. Daevabad, and the world of elemental magic and beings swirling around it, feels as fully-realized as any fantasy setting I've encountered.
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