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Recent reading
May. 20th, 2022 05:58 pmThe one book I finished this week was The City We Became by N.K Jemisin, which is a love letter to New York City and a middle finger to H.P. Lovecraft. (When not literally interdimensional tentacle monsters, the novel's Lovecraftian horror is embodied as racism and gentrification.) A friend of mine has been bugging me to read this book for ages, and my first week in NYC for a summer internship seemed like an appropriate time to do so.
In a world where particularly "alive" cities - São Paulo, Hong Kong, London, Lagos - are embodied by human avatars, New York splinters into six when its main avatar (and the city itself) is attacked by cosmic horrors, turning a handful of everyday New Yorkers into the avatars of the city's boroughs. Brooklyn is a rapper turned lawyer turned city councilwoman; the Bronx is an older Lenape woman, a veteran of the American Indian Movement and Stonewall; Queens is a young Indian immigrant in New York for grad school and an internship she hopes will turn into a H1B visa; Manhattan can't remember who he was before he arrived in the city but he's all slick smiles and sharp edges; Staten Island is the sheltered daughter of an abusive cop. They need to harness their newfound powers and work together (easier said than done) to save the primary avatar, and their city, from an interdimensional threat - the Enemy - that is both impossible to comprehend and far too easy to recognize.
This is a deeply unsubtle book - although, hey, some things are worth being blunt about - and ( sometimes the details feel piled-on for the sake of piling it on. ) I liked the city-magic more than the people-magic, both in the sense of the borough-avatars channeling their borough-specific-powers, and the Enemy weaponizing the cityscape (rather than individual people) against them; the monstrous Starbucks shops were probably my favorite. On the non-magical side, I really enjoyed the interactions between Bronca (the Bronx) and Brooklyn.
Of the metaphorical stack of books I have in progress, I'm almost done with This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel and pseudo-autobiography. I suspect I'm going to skim rather than read the last couple of chapters, because my patience for Amory Blaine (and Fitzgerald) is quickly running out. Was Eleanor Savage literature's first manic pixie dream girl?
In a world where particularly "alive" cities - São Paulo, Hong Kong, London, Lagos - are embodied by human avatars, New York splinters into six when its main avatar (and the city itself) is attacked by cosmic horrors, turning a handful of everyday New Yorkers into the avatars of the city's boroughs. Brooklyn is a rapper turned lawyer turned city councilwoman; the Bronx is an older Lenape woman, a veteran of the American Indian Movement and Stonewall; Queens is a young Indian immigrant in New York for grad school and an internship she hopes will turn into a H1B visa; Manhattan can't remember who he was before he arrived in the city but he's all slick smiles and sharp edges; Staten Island is the sheltered daughter of an abusive cop. They need to harness their newfound powers and work together (easier said than done) to save the primary avatar, and their city, from an interdimensional threat - the Enemy - that is both impossible to comprehend and far too easy to recognize.
This is a deeply unsubtle book - although, hey, some things are worth being blunt about - and ( sometimes the details feel piled-on for the sake of piling it on. ) I liked the city-magic more than the people-magic, both in the sense of the borough-avatars channeling their borough-specific-powers, and the Enemy weaponizing the cityscape (rather than individual people) against them; the monstrous Starbucks shops were probably my favorite. On the non-magical side, I really enjoyed the interactions between Bronca (the Bronx) and Brooklyn.
Of the metaphorical stack of books I have in progress, I'm almost done with This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel and pseudo-autobiography. I suspect I'm going to skim rather than read the last couple of chapters, because my patience for Amory Blaine (and Fitzgerald) is quickly running out. Was Eleanor Savage literature's first manic pixie dream girl?
