millennial_dandy's reviews
339 reviews

YA fantasy isn't usually a part of my wheelhouse, but this was fun. And the places that weren't so fun were properly dragged in the one-star reviews, which gives me hope for the future of the genre.

Growing up, this is exactly the type of story my brother, father, and I would have devoured alongside 'The Bartimaeus Trilogy,' and the 'Artemis Fowl' series. 'Six of Crows' falls squarely in the middle of both of the aforementioned works, so anyone who enjoyed this would most likely enjoy those (Artemis Fowl for the heist aspect, and Bartimaeus for the political commentary and darker shade of fantasy with slightly older characters).

What Worked

~I was afraid when I read about this duology that the worldbuilding would fall into that grating territory of being what I call 'not-England' (or really any 'not-[insert country in the real world]'). That is to say, that it would feel like each setting was a real place with a pale veneer of fantasy slapped on it just to hide poor research. Happily, Leigh Bardugo actually took the time to more painstakingly create a world to populate. In an interview, she mentioned that her inspirations for the city of Ketterdam were Amsterdam, Victorian London, New York, and Las Vegas. You can definitely tell, but in a way that doesn't feel directly derivative.

It was actually quite fun to get to know each new setting and their respective cultures. Cultures that, again, feel reminiscent of cultures readers will likely be at least passingly familiar with, but not very obviously one in particular. It made the worldbuilding sections drag much less and instead feel like the the unfurling of a map.

~Kaz as the central protagonist/ringleader of the group was a great character. Very much, again, in the vein of Artemis Fowl or The Bartimaeus Trilogy's Nathaniel. You want to wring this kid's neck but you enjoy his cleverness too much to ever actually do so. Up against other teenage 'anti-hero' types he's not super iconic, and if you read a lot of books like this, I imagine they start to bleed together, but that's just how tropes go. And in a duology with rotating POV characters in an ensemble cast it's hard for any one of them to get too much depth. Nevertheless, his tragic backstory does create for him a unique shoulder chip, and the interplay between that and the mythos he builds up for himself worked really well to make him feel sufficiently real and well-rounded, and, importantly, sympathetic.

The heist as well, while not breaking any new ground or doing anything unexpected, was entertaining, and even though the stakes never felt too high for any of our protagonists, the twists Bardugo was able to pull off felt void of significant plotholes and realistically could have been thought up by the respective characters.

The social commentary also worked well in the background. It came close in places, particularly in the conversations between Nina and Matthias, to being a bit too simplistic and on-the-nose a la that one song 'Savages' from Disney's 'Pocahontas,' but the themes of subjugation and resistance track pretty well against reality and 'Six of Crows' discusses them in a very appropriate way for the target audience of teenagers.

What Didn't Work

I know that reading YA of any genre is barking up the wrong tree if you're hoping to avoid inter-personal melodrama, but holy moly was this full of it. Easily the most tedious aspect of reading this novel was having to put up with the incredibly contrived 'will they or won't they' subplots. If Bardugo had chosen just TWO of the characters to play out this push and pull between I still would have found it obnoxious for reasons we'll get back to, but all SIX of the protagonists had 'will they or won't they' energy. And it really was to the detriment of their own character development in some cases.

I get it; these people are supposed to be teenagers, and teenagers have a tendency to create barriers that don't really exist even when it's obvious to anyone with a third-person perspective that they like each other. But oh my god, did EVERY twosome in this novel need that? Could not ONE pairing have a different dynamic?

The trouble stems, I think, from either Bardugo's personal inability to recognize that sex and emotions can actually be mutually exclusive or strong friendships can exist between boys and girls (or boys and boys and girls and girls). Just...some sort of variety would have been nice.

Of the three (unnecessary) pairings, by far the one I found most frustrating was between our bad boy in chief, Kaz, and his lieutenant, the lovely and dangerous acrobat, Inej. Everything that made either of these people interesting absolutely vanished every time the focus shifted to the 'will they or won't they' romance between them. Entire paragraphs lost to infuriating pining. And why? Why was there all this pining? Because Inej thought it was stupid of her to like the bad-boy, and because he felt he 'couldn't be the man she deserved.' I could have ripped the book in half when it came down to this.

Bardugo tried so hard to make it more complicated than that. She tried to make it about Kaz's aversion to touching other people (a side-effect of his traumatic tragic past, and woefully under-explored...), but no, in the end, on the last page of book one, he makes it clear that it really was just because 'he was no good for her.'

Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn't get her back.

Thanks, I hate it.

Why, Bardugo? Why did you put me through that for over 400 pages? And, I assume, 400 more for anyone willing to put themselves through the sequal? It's the year of our Lord, 2021 (almost 2022), can we please (I'm begging) PLEASE give the 'bad boy too bad for good girl' a rest? Or just do something new with it. Anything.

Did I mention that I loathed the Kax/Inej 'romance?'

And let's not even get into how phoned-in the last-minute 'Jesper and Wylan are actually into each other' thing was. I was so mad about having to deal with the others that I didn't have enough venom left to care as much as I might have, but this really did feel like 'representation bingo' rather than an organic revelation. I suppose it could be argued that they started off pulling each other's pigtails before evolving to catching feelings, but something in this transition felt performative and lazy.

A lot of this probably could have been solved or at least made less tedious if one or two of the POVs had been cut. There were very few instances where we needed Jesper's perspective, for instance, or even Matthias's. Jesper was almost always in the same room as at least one other POV character, so he added nothing, and having Matthias as a POV character knocked a ton of tension out of his relationship with Nina. If we had only seen him through her eyes there would have been actual ambiguity regarding his loyalty to the group and to her, and this would have raised the stakes when they actually made it to his home country. But because we have so many chapters from his point of view, we know exactly where his loyalties lie and what he's ultimately going to do, so there was no real chance of him being a double-agent.

TL;DR
As is typical of novels with multiple POV characters, there felt like one or two too many which knocked a lot of otherwise natural tension out of the plot in some key places, and even lowered the stakes of the heist overall by giving the reader too much information. The romances were incredibly simplistic and irritating and immature--especially considering that by every other metric these characters don't behave like teenagers.

That being said, the worldbuilding is solid, the magic system is interesting, and the 'Oceans Eleven'-style heist was a fun romp.

3.5

I want to begin by congratulating myself on finishing this brick of a book (high fantasy is, I know, known for 500+ page installments in series that can be 10 books long or more). 703 hard-fought pages later and I feel about as world-weary as the characters that made it with me to the end.

Recommended to me by my partner, who is well-versed in the genre, and heralded by him as the high fantasy series (Lord of the Rings notwithstanding), I set off on my quest to read this book months ago. Finally taking out my bookmark and placing 'Gardens of the Moon' back upon the shelf brought with it a sense of pride, of accomplishment...and relief. A bone-deep sense of solace that the journey is over (though the line of books in which it sits insists otherwise).

It wasn't that I disliked the reading experience so much as it felt like a mammoth task of herculean proportions for me; stranded in an unfamiliar genre with all the trappings of fantasy of this type that have always made it so, well, intimidating. And I say this after having tackled quite a few literary classics: we are not the true heroes--oh no--the true heroes are the writers and readers of these titanic fantasy series that make your 'Harry Potters' as well as your 'War and Peaces' seem like child's play by page-count comparison.

I can see why the 'Malazan' series is so fervently beloved by both my partner and its other die-hard fans. Having also just read 'Six of Crows' there is definitely something to be said about the difference in skill level of the respective authors (nothing against Leigh Bardugo or fans of that series, mind). Steven Erikson, I can only imagine, must live in the world of his own creation to be able to keep track of every little detail of the sprawling landscape (both literal and political).

I stand behind my decision not to read beyond about a 3 page sample of 'A Song of Ice and Fire' on the grounds that George R.R. Martin's writing style was more convoluted than it was a vehicle for complex storytelling, and indeed, the numerous asides and worldbuilding dead ends did nothing but weigh down any meaning he was apparently trying to impart.

'Gardens of the Moon,' mercifully, did not suffer from this same issue, Erikson seemingly having the sense to recognize that form and function can actually harmonize to form sentences that are both comprehensible and rich with innovative imagery.

I would not say that this series is for beginners (being a beginner-level epic fantasy reader myself) both given the dizzying word count total of 3 and a quarter million ( million!) as well as the complete lack of any kind of spoon-feeding by the author. That is to say: expect nary a paragraph dedicated to info-dumping -- Erikson throws the reader straight in the deep end and god help you if you don't know how to swim. From page one you are hit with place names, conflicts and political intrigue the characters already know all about, a magic system that starts popping off during a battle we get flung into involving people we don't know. And one of them dies immidiately.

It honestly took me nearly half of the book to feel settled into Genabackis and a bit more than that to fully understand who all the characters were, where they fell in the grand scheme of the plot, and then another lil chunk to re-acquaint myself with some of them after their long absence.

It was a lot.

Additionally, because this is the first book in a sprawling series, the bulk of the page count was dedicated to spreading a bunch of characters across the map and then bringing them back together at the end as in the background you kept the sense that there were larger things afoot. That being said, the plot (what plot?) of this novel consists mostly of setting the wheels in motion for future action. There was a climax that was satisfying enough to avoid getting blue balls, but that didn't really conclude any major plotlines.

To an extent, this kept things fairly grounded because, well, war is complicated and messy, and the lead-up to it even more so (as anyone who has even dipped a toe into WWI or Vietnam War history can attest). I defy anyone, even someone who is a die-hard fan to succinctly summarize what all the chess moves were that happened in this book. They do likely have a better understanding of who the two players are, though. Better than I do, though I think I at least know who a good chunk of the pieces are (this does apparently get thrown totally out the window in the next book where you start over with a wholly new set of characters).

You get some great characters for your trouble in this one. It's amazing that with such a large ensemble cast Erikson was able to flesh out enough of these people for them to feel solid. The group in our second location, Darujistan, got the most 'screen' time, so I felt like I knew them the best, but there were some other cool characters in the other groupings as well.

Kruppe is incredibly likable and funny, Paran is your sympathetic 'everyman' hero, Crokus is a dumb teenager that you can't help but root for, and some of the more mysterious characters like Rake and Tool feel appropriately intimidating and cool.

Once I got used to it, I liked the magic system. But more than that I thought Erikson's take on gods was super novel. They are incredibly powerful, but like the Greek gods, they have a lot of in-fighting, and they also often have direct dealings with mortals. Unlike the Greek gods, however, they can be killed, they can be tricked, and their influence has limitations (though what those limitations are remain murky, at least in this installation).

Would I continue on with the series? It's hard to say. Again, 3 million words is just such an intimidating prospect that I can't help but feel paralyzed by it. Yet, because by the end of 'Gardens of the Moon' everything was left unresolved it is certainly tempting to plow ahead just to see what the hell all this setup was driving at. Time will tell.

2.5 --> and the .5 is only because Dan Stevens was such a good narrator.

I don't have much to say about this reading experience, honestly. 'The Odyssey' is, of course, an epic classic, referenced in a million different things, and adapted into a million different plays and films and picture books. It's one of those foundation texts that any reader worth their salt should have under their belt--we all kind of get it.

This was an odyssey just to get through. I felt like it was I and not Odysseus who went on a 20 year journey just to finish it.

Like many epics like it (Beowulf, the Iliad, etc.) the pacing of 'The Odyssey' is, by 21st century standars, abysmal. Even listening to it as an audiobook, which I thought would make it more lively, every section dragged. And I'm not talking about the asides and little side stories; those were honestly some of the most interesting sections--I'm talking about everything else. None of the characters except maybe Odysseus's son, Telemachus, felt sufficiently fleshed out enough for me to care about them; they were just names on a page.

The timeline was a mess, and then the ending just kind of...happens.

All of the iconic episodes (the cyclops, the sirens, the Circe episode) are practically footnotes, and the bulk of the text is taken up with everyone building Odysseus up as the most amazing person who ever lived. And I hated him. I like a good arrogant character, but they have to be charming. I get hit over the head by other characters claiming Odysseus is this charming, charismatic person, but nothing that he ever does feels that way.

He just sort of wanders around for 20 years, completely at the whim of the gods, and gets told how clever he is and what a great warrior he is by everyone. And then he does something we're told is clever and pulls out some heroic feat and then moves on to the next location.

Achilles, of the Iliad, is a super arrogant character as well, but he has charisma and his motivations, while not always commendable, are at least interesting. And those faults are actually commented on in the story, and critiqued, and discussed. But Odysseus just moseys around without any criticism whatsoever. Thanks, I hate it.

'Other lands, other customs' as the Germans would say, but even so, I have a hard time imagining the Greeks justifying some of this guy's utter skeeviness, and some of it must surely trancend cultural acceptability.

A word with Homer, please.

This was a delightful read with one of those irresistibly original premises that seem so often to be the only good thing about them. Happily in this case, Talarigo's writing and introspective musings on the indomitable need for self-actualization no matter what limitations are put on a human life do the premise justice.

Miss Fuji is an achingly genuine protagonist, and through her story we are submerged in the world of pearl divers and lepers in post-war Japan. Though the metaphor of the title feels a bit on the nose, there's a distinct subtleness to its application in the story that is almost never immidiate. Like a pearl, the work of making something beautiful out of something ugly takes time.

What amounts to a sprawling narrative spanning over 40 years is packed into a modest 237 pages with nary a word wasted. Just like time in the real world, the events of Pearl Diver seem at once to linger and go by in a flash.

While Talarigo's writing isn't what I'd call lyrical, there is a real dreaminess to his style.

I read 'Pearl Diver' in the height of winter, but it feels like the kind of novel one ought to read under the shade of a tree or under an umbrella on some forgotten beach. If you do, look up from time to time, and you might catch Miss Fuji waving at you from the shore of the Nagashima leprosarium.

I suppose one could say that going into year three of the Covid-19 pandemic has got me in the mood for a bit of cathartic apocalypse reading. Enter 'Wastelands.'

With stories from 22 different authors, 'Wastelands' as a collection really does have something for everyone: technology and nuclear-warfare run amok, check. Inter-planetary travel, check. Commentary on religion, check. And plague and mutants, of course. We get to see the world end 22 different times, in 22 different ways.

To say that 'cynicism' runs as rampant as some of the viruses in this collection would be a collosal understatement, so no new ground was trod there, yet the stories were picked with enough care that this rather bleak messaging at least didn't feel redundant.

There are some big names in 'Wastelands': we start off with Stephen King, we get George R.R. Martin, Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, and a slew of others that, based on the brief biographies, seem like fairly heavy-hitters in sci-fi/dystopian fiction.

Were there any standouts? Well, this is where we get subjective. The very stories I found to be the least punchy could easily be someone else's favorite, but I will say that I was personally more impressed by some of the authors I'd never heard of than the ones I had. Not because the more famous names had done less impressive work, just that if you've read one King or Butler story, you kind of know what to expect, and you get it.

My personal favorites, i.e. the ones I found the creepiest, the most uncanny, the ones that really got under my skin, were:

1. The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi -- If you're an animal lover, this one is tough, but Bacigalupi does an amazing job really taking a look at the dark side of things like cloning and hyper-advanced medicine.

2. A Song Before Sunset by David Grigg -- A truly heartbreaking counterpart to the infinitely more optimist 'Station Eleven' by Emily St. John Mandel, this story explores a similar thesis: 'survival is insufficient.'

3. When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow -- This wasn't so much creepy as it was novel in its perspective. The apocalypse itself was your standard 'everyone catches a mysterious illness and dies instantly' fare, but our POV characters are a group of data scientists and programmers who try to keep the internet running post-apocalypse by networking with small groups like theirs around the world. Some of the lingo likely went over my head, as I've limited proximity to that sphere, but it was an interesting thought experiment.

4. Judgment Passed by Jerry Oltion -- What if the Day of Reckoning Comes, but you were off-planet and so you missed it? That's the premise of this short story. A small group of astronauts return to Earth only to discover that in their absense, God or Jesus swooped down and took away all the people, leaving them the sole humans to populate the planet. This sparks discussion among them of whether or not to try to get God's attention and let Him know He missed a few. Though seemingly an on-the-nose examination of religious fanaticism, Oltion does it in such a smart way that it feels fresh.

3.5

Having completed Ray Bradbury's famous short story collection, 'The Illustrated Man,' I feel like I've learned two very important things about his preoccupations. One, the man clearly loved rockets. Two, He also seemed supremely confident humans would colonize Mars. No, he and Elon Musk aren't secretly the same person (allegedly).

"The Illustrated Man" runs quite the emotional gamut, at times deeply pessimistic and cynical, at others hopeful.

The titular tale, which serves as the framing narrative, is a great concept that, sadly, is more of a gimmick than a fully fleshed-out story in its own right.

What with all the rockets and Martians, there are definitely places where some of the stories bleed together, which is a shame because the reading experience of each individual story is quite good. But because of this, upon reflection, most of the stories I remember well are from the beginning and the end of the collection and the middle is a bit of a blur.

Overall, these are, I feel, the best under the category of each theme:

1. The Veldt -- The collection opens with this unsettling tale of a family eh... ripped apart, shall we say, by technology meant to afford them lives of ease and leisure. There's also a cautionary tale about parents who use TV as a surrogate 'nanny' for their kids in there too.

2. Kaleidoscope -- 'Rocket men' and space travel feature heavily in this collection, and Bradbury swings back and forth between the joy of this possible future and the ennui he seems to think it would bring with it. And what better way to explore that tension than by having a group of astronauts falling through space to their deaths contemplating exactly whether or not it was worth it?

3. The Fire Balloons -- One of a few stories exploring the rather niche intersection between religion and space exploration. Specifically, Bradbury attempts to throw his own answer into the ring as to whether or not the aliens were 'saved' by Jesus back in ye olde day. Incidentally, this was a real concern and hot topic back in 1835 during the 'Great Moon Hoax' (seriously, you should go read about that--really wild stuff was afoot ) Regardless of the faith of a given reader, 'Fire Balloons' is a touching story about how even if one has the best intentions, missionaries are very cringy.

4. The Visitor -- Another story with an ax to grind, 'The Visitor' could be seen as a fair allegory for a wide range of things, though my favorite interpretation is as a critique of tourism and how by over-exploiting picturesque or otherwise popular destinations we destroy them. At its core, though, this is a cautionary tale about greed of any kind and how it is so very often the reason no one can have nice things.

Honorable Mentions: The Long Rain/The City -- Though they don't tie into any broad, overarching themes, I thought these were the best in terms of displaying Bradbury's writing style.

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors [...] and it never stopped.

The city waited twenty thousand years. The planet moved through space and the flowers of the fields grew up and fell away, and still the city waited; and the rivers of the planet rose and waned and turned to dust. Still the city waited. The winds that had been young and wild grew old and serene, and the clouds of the sky that had been ripped and torn were left alone to drift in idle whiteness. Still the city waited.

A classic Christopher Pike 'whodoneit' that is predictably a bit twistier than it first appears.

As I'm finding with many of his thrillers, Pike knows how to land a hook, but the follow-through sometimes feels a bit limp.

'Fall into Darkness' had a great setup of murder (or was it...?) in a friend group while on a camping trip, and our first reveal, while not shocking, was well-executed. The second 'twist' was...fine, but more sloppily executed. It was perfectly possible, but Pike failed to set it up in a few key moments that would have made it feel like a true 'aha' moment. That and a series of truly implausable events involving law enforcement right at the end as we went careening towards the climax. There was one clever plot device involving a ring, but it wasn't enough to hold the back half of the plot up.

My three stars go in large, large part to part one where we get Ann's disappearance and the trial. Now, the trial was, even to me as a layperson, completely overly sensationalized. Granted, this is YA, but even a teenager would scoff at some of the antics. But, suspension of disbelief and all that, and it was at least exciting. Ann as a character was quite strong, and our secondary lead, Sharon, provided good support. I think the boys were the ones pulling the cast down in this one.

There was also a nice little easter egg callback to 'Gimme a Kiss' which was well-placed.

A good but not great title from Mr. Pike's bibliography.

3.5 rounded down to 3

The title 'Leave the World Behind' is cleverly deceptive. I indeed read this book to 'leave the world behind' and instead found myself, just like the central families, dragged back to some fairly harsh realities.

There are a number of topics Alam attempts to tackle in this relatively trim novel, but the most salient are race and class. He does a really good job capturing the rather pathetic neo-liberal, middle-class white identity, though the first chapter or so is a bit on the nose for my taste, especially considering that later scenes involving these identities are so much smarter and more subtle.

This is one of those books where the style won't be for everyone. It's very concept-heavy, and there are swathes of the novel that are incredibly dialogue-heavy and serve to chew over some of Alam's preoccupations and rely a lot more on telling than showing, which isn't everyone's cup of tea. As a result of these sections, the pacing can sometimes feel all over the place, though I would argue that the inconsistant pacing serves to help build the sometimes dreamy atmosphere and the sense of being outside of time.

The plot is actually two plots. The first is my favorite of the two, and the section I'll probably remember best and think about most often. Alam lays bare so well the very real way in which 'home' is more of a concept than a matter of ownership. When we're on vacation, the hotel is 'home' even though it's super temporary and designed to be relatively anonymous. I've certainly caught myself slipping and saying 'I'm going home' rather than 'I'm going back to the hotel' from time to time. In this case that feeling is the basis of the central tension in the first plot.

A family staying at an Air B&B property have made themselves quite at home when one day a couple claiming to own the house arrive and ask to stay over. There's this deliciously awkward relationship that develops between the two families as the family renting the property doesn't want the owners there, but since it's not really their house, they recognize that the request by the owners isn't a genuine one; they could, theoretically, just mosey on in like...well, like they own the place.

Neither family really cares for the other, and everyone is silently very judgemental, though outwardly they all feel obligated to maintain social niceties.

The real kicker of this part of the novel, though, is that the family renting the house has no way of confirming that this other family is who they claim to be, i.e. the owners, as a mysterious event nearby has knocked the internet out of commission.

I loved this part of 'LTWB' and I wish the entire novel would have been about this question. But instead, we enter into plot number 2 which is a more straight-forward apacalypse story.

Plot number 2 is alright, it's ok. But I spent all of January this year reading apocalyptic fiction so by this point I'm a bit 'apocalypsed out.' Especially considering that Alam's apocalypse doesn't break any new ground in the genre and is fairly standard fare. Hence, the 3 instead of 4 star overall rating; the bonus .5 is because of just how good the first plot is.

Anyone who likes this novel would likely enjoy the film 'The Invitation' and vice versa.

I can't get enough of the 'awkward social situations made somehow worse by the constraints of politeness' plot device, so I'm definitely the target audience here.

It's worth reading, but probably more so if you haven't just read a bunch of apocalypse/dystopian novels and short stories.

3.5

I don't typically read essay collections because though one given essay may pique my interest, it's rare that the collection as a whole is something I'd want to commit to, particularly a collection of essays all by the same author.

Zadie Smith is, of course, an incredibly well-regarded writer, and is best known, perhaps, for her novel 'White Teeth'.

I haven't read any of her novels, but 'Intimations' gives me a sense of the flavor I might expect, and I liked what I tasted.

This collection was of particular interest to me as it must be one of the very first published works of any genre covering the COVID-19 pandemic given that it was published in the summer of 2020.

In some ways, her words about those early months feel very distant given how gruelling the long-haul has been, dulling some of my memories of the months of panic and lockdown she's largely ruminating on. But I do think it's important to have documents like this, almost especially because I think for so many of us those early months of the pandemic feel like some kind of collective fever dream.

She writes in 'Intimations' about how much pressure we were all feeling to be productive during lockdown with this sudden wealth of time on our hands.

The general vibe of that portion of the collection reminded me strongly of an Onion article headline from the same period:

I know that's definitely how I feel looking back. There's a part of me that thinks: 'dangit, Ren. You could have used all that time so much more productively!'

Smith never uses the word 'trauma' to describe why people in the spring and summer of 2020 might not have gotten around to writing the next 'Great American novel'--I don't think we were quite ready to call the pandemic traumatic back in July 2020. But it was certainly traumatic for me, though my experience was likely better than some and worse than others. So I try not to be so hard on 2020 me for all the books I didn't write, bread I didn't bake, and languages I didn't learn. I got myself and my kitty back home from abroad and then both of us across the border to reunite with my partner. Humbly, I feel like that's not too shabby.

The final essay, 'Contempt as a Virus' has been regarded by many of the reviewers as the best of the lot. And I can understand why. Smith draws a powerful comparison between the literal virus behind the pandemic to a metaphorical virus of contempt leading to the mistreatment of Black and brown people in America.

Though I agreed with everything she drew attention to in her essay, the content of her ideas are fairly well known to most leftists and certainly to People of Color.

Consequently, 'Contempt as a Virus' wasn't the one that stuck with me. What has stuck with me from this reading experience was the description she gave of a conversation between herself and a neighbor. Unbeknownst to her neighbor, Smith is preparing to return to England to weather the pandemic there rather than in her adopted home of NYC. Her neighbor tells her that they're all in this together, and they'll all look out for each other and see the thing through together as neighbors, as a community. Smith describes her feelings of shame and sadness at hearing what is meant as a reassuring message because she knows she is in fact running away, not facing the danger with her neighbors.

This especially resonated with me as someone who also fled the country I was in at the start of the pandemic (Russia) for the country of my birth (the USA). And I too felt a similar sense of betraying my neighbors and my community by 'running away.' It was, of course, more complicated than that (which Smith obviously knew as well), but that feeling of wanting to stick something out with your community while knowing that that might not be what's best for you is a very strange and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

In these early essays, she captures the ominous first days of the pandemic so vividly that her words really did bring back a lot of the feelings I think many of us had at the beginning. Feelings of shock, mostly, that the ground could shift under us so suddenly; something practically unknown to those of us lucky enough to live in countries with relative stability. The collective trauma has come in hindsight, but the shellshock of that announcement: '11 March 2020: The WHO declares the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic' and the shock of the subsequent lockdowns, seeing the streets of Moscow empty, Times Square empty, that shellshock has worn off, but in her essays, Smith really knows how to evoke the ghost of it.

Because this collection really is the result of Smith's raw initial and incredibly subjective experience, not all of it will work for everyone. Some might say that none of it reflects their experience of the pandemic's early months or of the civil unrest in the summer of 2020, but I personally found a lot of it to be cathartic, if perhaps (in retrospect) a tad naive. But that might just be my addled 2022 pandemic-fatigued mind talking.

It's an interesting, short read. Give it a try.