{"id":162658149,"date":"2026-02-27T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=162658149"},"modified":"2026-02-26T21:14:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T02:14:47","slug":"friday-links-cities-are-great-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=162658149","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: Cities Are Great Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\u201cBronca likes this view, though, because it makes clear that New York is a city of people, not its businesses and landmarks\u2026they all gotta eat, educate their kids, sleep, and get by somehow.\u201d – N.K. Jemisin, \u2018The City We Became\u2019<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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Boy, reading feels good. My kid has reached an age where he’s excited about reading\u2014he’s not on chapter books yet, though I think we’re right around the corner\u2014and sometimes he gets to stay up a little later in his room, as long as he’s reading<\/em>. My parents had this rule as a kid, as did another friend-whom-I-regularly-slept-over-with’s parents. Shoutout to the Galloways. Do you have memories of staying up late because you simply couldn’t put a novel down? What happened next was too important to learn? My heart’s racing just thinking about it. This week’s book did that for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Oh, and quick before we start: great episode of The Lazy & Entitled Podcast<\/em> this week, featuring an interview with Shipwrecked Sailor Blog favorite H Kapp-Klote. It’s a great interview, and Brendan really outdid himself with the music on this one. If you haven’t been listening in 2026, you’re missing out on some great interviews and<\/em> even more great music, nearly all of it stuff that Brendan is basically improvising. Check it out: Apple<\/a> | Spotify<\/a> | SoundCloud<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I’ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first novel since the beginning of January! Gotta tell you dudes, I was craving it. Helps that this one is not only well-written and exciting and genre-bending and totally engrossing, but also part one of a duology. Side note: I have a thing about duologies, like why don’t you make it a trilogy? Or pentology? Why my brain is like this, I’m not sure. I am<\/em> sure excited to have this series blow up that paradigm for me, though. I’m gonna let it, too. I’m talking, of course, about The City We Became <\/em>by N.K. Jemisin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The City We Became <\/em>by N.K. Jemisin:<\/strong> it is sort of impossible to describe genre books to non-genre fans without sounding corny. Here is what I texted my parents and brother (a Manhattan resident!) after reading: “the fantasy\/horror conceit is that the great cities of the world have human avatars who manifest when a ‘great city’ reaches a ‘certain level of development.’ New York, though, has an avatar for each borough. They must come together to battle a city-killing enemy, and the whole thing is a metaphor for not being xenophobic and insular.” Our leads are Manny (Manhattan, a newcomer with amnesia), Brooklyn (a former rapper turned City Councilwoman, what did N.K. Jemisin know about Young Cardamom<\/a> and when did she know it), Padmini (Queens, another avatar who was born outside of New York but nevertheless becomes a part of New York), Bronca (The Bronx, a Lenape woman who runs an art gallery that allows people with precarious housing to sleep upstairs), and Aislyn (Staten Island, the daughter of a violent racist Irish cop who has never even been off of Staten Island). Our main antagonist is The Woman In White, a Lovecraftian demon from another dimension. Helping our heroes is (S\u00e3o) Paulo, Hong (Kong), and Veneza, who hails from Jersey City and works at Bronca’s art gallery. The plot is chiefly the team getting together and learning about their powers via a bit of questing and testing, and they must eventually awaken New York City’s primary avatar. this novel does not merely<\/em> set up Book Two, but know that the metaphor and themes are more important than plot in this action-packed odyssey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of that established, let\u2019s get into theme and metaphor. The novel is a well-crafted dramatization of various themes: humans are social animals and some people don\u2019t like admitting that; multiculturalism is good and necessary whereas the fascist ethnostate means death; people will sometimes irrationally choose polite civility over self-preservation; white supremacy is a helluva drug. Tying these themes to cities carries some historical weight. Humans huddle in groups because the night is full of lions and tigers and bears, and cities give us strength in numbers and infrastructure. You can either accept this fact or be scared of it. I\u2019m not saying that people must<\/em> live in cities, but I am saying that unless you\u2019re a real-deal farmer, you probably should. For all sorts of reasons\u2014environmental, cultural, spiritual. At one point, The Enemy asserts that cities are bad for the environment. Clearly, she\u2019s never sat in Murfreesboro traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCan you accept others as people\u201d is the central question everyone, not just the idiot borough, has to deal with. Your mileage may vary, but I admire how much this novel is trying to get at the<\/em> central conflict of our time. Well, not the rising tides of fascism\u2014that\u2019s the next book in the duology. But this xenophobic aspect that undergirds the march to fascism, yes. I love this novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t have time to get into or really compare and contrast where this sits in other great \u201cpeople represent places\u201d novels, like The Tin Drum<\/em> or Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>. TCWB<\/em> is not magical realism, it\u2019s very much eldritch horror written by a fantasy writer. Something Brendan said about an anime he\u2019s watching made me realize how much there\u2019s a questing aspect to this novel, too. There\u2019s just not enough space to get into it all here, but honestly? I will probably be re-reading it in 2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something to listen to while you browse? Hey, it’s Punk Rock Year and Black History Month, and yet we still haven’t listened to FUPU, aka Fuck You Pay Us. Apparently, these dudes really live the punk rock ethos, are feminist and queer and outspoken in their antiracism, and to go to one of their shows is to believe a better world is possible. Let’s check out a YouTube video\u2014of which there are shockingly few, at least on first search. Anyway, please follow Lazy & Entitled on all socials. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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