2021 read #4: Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip.

Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip

262 pages

Published 1996

Read from October 22 to October 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

If I used The Lord of the Rings to ease myself back into reading, Winter Rose helped to remind me of what I love about reading in the first place.

This is a gorgeous book, dreamy and full of feelings rather than certainties. McKillip's prose comes into its own here, spare at times and lush in others as the seasons turn through her narrative. It reminded me of the possibilities of the written word, the gentle heartbreak and delicate power inherent within fantasy. The whole time I found myself wishing I could write McKillip's seemingly effortless prose, reproduce the lightness of her touch, the richness of her ambiguity.

It all works far better for me here than it did in The Book of Atrix Wolfe. Whether that means McKillip's faculties improved significantly within a year, or my tastes changed significantly over the last five, is anyone's guess. (It's probably the latter.)

2021 read #3: The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien.*

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien*

366 pages

Published 1977

Read from October 6 to October 22

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

Another book I'm unsure how to review. I read it once before, during my Middle-earth phase in the early 2000s, and found it a challenging read at the time. The book has a reputation of being dense and borderline biblical in its ponderous begats and condensed battles. This time around, though, I found a new comparison: it reads like a setting guidebook from a tabletop RPG.

The hardest part of reading a new book (for me) is getting over that initial hump of investing myself in the characters and the narrative. It's what makes books of short stories particularly challenging -- you have to adjust to a new set of characters (and, in SFF, often a new setting) every few pages. Rereading the Middle-earth books has been nice because I already know the characters, the setting, and the broad strokes of the stories. It's comfort reading. I didn't prepare any deep thoughts to share while I read it. What matters to me now is relearning how to read for fun, and this was a nice book to rediscover in that context.

2021 read #2: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.*

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien*

1112 pages

Published 1955

Read from about September 10 to October 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

It's been a long while since I've read for my own entertainment. Like, a long while. I don't think I've gone this long without finishing a book since I began regularly reading in the early 1990s. Thanks, depression!

To ease myself back into reading, I decided to start with an old familiar favorite. I first read The Lord of the Rings after watching The Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001. It became a yearly fixture -- I read it at least once a year, usually in September, until 2005 or so. And then I just stopped, and didn't pick it up again.

I'm not sure how to review a book like this. (I'm no longer sure how to review books, period, so please bear with me.) There were fantasy novels before this, and Tolkien himself was influenced by many of them. LotR's enduring popularity and its central role in the development of later 20th century fantasy is a complicated business. It figured in the counterculture and folk revival of the ensuring decades, but also formalized an array of epic fantasy tropes that would be recycled well into the 21st century, when finally an influx of writers with different perspectives would breathe fresh life into the genre. There's also an astounding amount of casual racism in the text, thanks to the bizarre British taste for treating human beings like breeds of livestock. There's a lot to unpack, and I'm not sure where to start, so maybe I'll just skip that part.

Tolkien as a storyteller excels in two situations: when he narrates daily life from a hobbit perspective, and when he incorporates the magic and mystery of the natural world into his narrative. Contrary to its reputation, and sadly for the book itself, LotR is a lot more than halflings singing about trees. Tolkien struggles when attempting to tell his tale from a "courtly" vantage, losing the poetry of his own style in a creaky pastiche of the heroic mode. The first third of the book, Fellowship, fares best in this regard, but suffers a bit in modern eyes from pacing issues. When Aragorn becomes a central viewpoint protagonist, the narration becomes a disembodied mess of omniscient perspective, and gets weighed down with disgusting Numenorean master-race bullshit along the way.

Lord of the Rings endures, nevertheless, as a stirring and beautiful paean to cottagecore aesthetics rooted in worldbuilding of astounding depth. It was a nice reintroduction to the pleasures of reading for fun, which is exactly what I wanted it to be.

2021 read #1: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

 A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

419 pages

Published 2015

Read from January 1 to January 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

2020 was not kind to me, and this is reflected in how few books I finished last year: six, quite possibly the fewest books I've read in a calendar year since 1990 or so. My book reviews were never insightful in the best of times, and now I face the extra struggle of rust. I haven't written a review since July, when my life was entirely different, before so many things fell apart. What thoughts can I even string together here that feel worthy of such a return from bad places?

I don't want to give up on reviewing what I read just yet. I've maintained this blog since 2013. It's a luxury to be able to go back and read my thoughts (however vague and disjointed) on any random book I read in the last eight years. So I'll try to pull something together for now, and in the future, I hope to put in a better effort to write reviews worth reading.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the default YA fantasy books of recent years. If you go on Instagram and search tags like #fantasybooks, Sarah J. Maas titles will be ubiquitous -- tastefully arranged on beds of cotton fluff, bedecked with flowers. I've always had a hipster streak, a preference for forgotten or underappreciated works and a tendency (unconscious or not) to avoid the popular titles. But my partner R bought me a lovely copy of Thorns, and when I found myself picking up the pieces of my old life, it was one of the few things I took away with me, and just the sort of light escapism I needed to get me back into reading.

YA fiction has anger issues. Every character will be snarky or sarcastic to every other; narrators will arrive with chips on their shoulder. This isn't my sort of thing -- but I acknowledge I'm not the target audience here, and haven't been for about twenty years. For the most part, Thorns handles this fairly well, justifying the walls our narrator has built around herself. Perhaps the fey beings she encounters could have been more august and freighted with the centuries they have seen, and perhaps major plot contrivances happen solely through our narrator's stubbornness two too many times, but it works. There were glimpses of delightful fey strangeness here and there, and I enjoyed how horny everyone became maybe halfway through.

I can't decide how I feel about the main faery dude being named Tamlin. Given the name, and the mask magically stuck to his face, I naturally assumed that a particular twist would be coming -- and then it never came. I'm glad I didn't guess a major twist, but then I have to ask, why was he even named Tamlin in the first place? Enough of the book loosely aligned with the titular ballad that I guess I can see the connection between the two, but it was a bit distracting in the early chapters all the same.

2020 read #6: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
266 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 2 to July 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I don't often read graphic novels. One might be justified in saying I don't know how to read graphic novels. Words are my thing; I appreciate art, but in a sequential story with words to read, my eye skims past panel after panel to get to the next speech bubble. And then when I've finished all the words, I feel shorted, as if disregarding 90% of what makes a graphic novel distinct from a conventional novel would leave me feeling anything other than let down.

Stevenson's adorable but minimalist style can make it hard to linger, only rarely filling panels with background details to reward close inspection. When I reminded myself to slow it down and appreciate things, however, the seemingly simple character work and framing revealed emotional depth, a keen understanding of how to convey feeling through a single line, the set of a jaw or a patch of highlighting. The emotional weight of the story also crept up on me, surprising me with tears a couple of times before the end.

In the future, whenever I read graphic novels, I want to learn how to pace myself so that I appreciate all the artistry and work that goes into everything surrounding the words. There's so much more to this sort of story than the bubbles of dialogue, no matter how impatient my brain might be to get to the next word.

2020 read #5: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin.

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.

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.