Short Black history book for a long (compared to usual) Black History Month

For this Black History Month I finally (after too many years) read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which, at fewer than 200 pages, also counts for “short books for a short month.” I think I bought my copy at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture sometime in 2019. Five years is, sadly, not an atypical amount of time for something to sit on my bookshelf before I actually read it.

Reviewing Baldwin feels vaguely blasphemous not just because he is widely recognized as one of the greats but also because he is a Black man writing in the 1940s and 1950s and I am a white girl who wasn’t even born until the 1980s, so what am I gonna do, say he’s wrong about anything? I don’t know, I’m reading to learn here. Also, the first three essays are all critical reviews of books and movies that I haven’t read or seen; he could be making them up whole cloth and I wouldn’t know (I assume someone else would have noticed by now if that were the case, of course). But anyway all I can say about the first section of the book is that I’m not always sure what he’s talking about due to my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but he is entertainingly savage in the particular digs he makes at these pieces of media. Baldwin is not known for showering praise upon pretty much anyone or anything so it’s probably unsurprising to see that he doesn’t really like “protest novels” or “social novels” by either white or black authors, although his diagnoses of what’s wrong with them differs.

The other essays are largely biographical, about life in Harlem, a job in New Jersey, his father, newspapers, getting arrested in Paris. Baldwin is unsparing in his analysis of the social and psychological ills of, again, basically everybody. Some of it is dryly funny in a way that Baldwin always manages to immediately make you feel bad about finding funny, because it really is a blistering look at a lot of harsh realities (and, perhaps more importantly, unrealities). There are a lot of the sorts of really profound quotes that people like to dig out of the essays and post as standalones and many of them do sort of do that themselves in the essays themselves, kind of jumping off the page and slapping you in the face, but they really work much better as punctuation of whatever tragically human anecdote Baldwin was telling us.

For book club I might have to google for smarter discussion questions than the ones I can come up with. It probably wouldn’t go amiss for me to re-read some of the more complex essays, like the titular one about Baldwin’s father’s death and the riots that broke out in Harlem at the same time. As one of the few non-Jews in the group I’m also particularly interested in the discussion that will ensue about the second half of “The Harlem Ghetto,” which is about Black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-Blackness, and the causes and effects of each and their relationship to each other and the wider social structures of the U.S. I am personally more “at home” in the sections on “let’s talk about why newspapers are so bad” and, of course, the later essays where Baldwin dunks on the French (and on Francophiles), so I think it will be instructive.

In which the Wayward Children are more wayward than usual

In another short book for a short month (although this February is at least a little longer than most Februaries), I checked out the newest Wayward Children novella, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. This one follows pretty directly upon the last one: our main character is again Antsy, who has found her way to the school and has sort-of fallen in with our group of series mains, rooming briefly with Cora and getting saved from Seraphina’s machinations by Kade, Sumi, Cora, Christopher, and some of the Whitethorn escapees.

This honestly seemed a little bit of a bridge book, referring heavily to stuff that happened elsewhere in the series and serving mostly to tidy up some loose ends around Antsy and, to a lesser extent, Sumi and Kora. The main plot is the direct follow-up to how Antsy left things at the shop, which perhaps not surprisingly didn’t go exactly to plan. There is some fun jaunting around to Prism and then to a world full of dinosaurs (I did honestly think the dinosaurs would take up more of the book, given that they are on the front cover, but the sojourn into dinosaur world was pretty brief), but most of it take place either at school or in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Series-wise, the biggest turn seems to be the increasing clues that Eleanor may be losing her touch and responsibility needing to be increasingly turned over to Kade–who, we find out, may have been kicked out of his world by the fairies whose rules he broke by being a guy, but who is wanted back in that world very much by the goblin side of things, who have named him the Goblin Prince. It would be great fun for the series to head in the direction of that showdown, but if it does, who will take care of the school? And that’s the thing that makes me want to read more of these–less the enjoyment of this particular installment and more just the positioning of the characters at the end, where some plotlines have resolved and others seem to be opening up. That said, these books are so short that it doesn’t feel like a big ripoff to have one installment where it feels like not much happened and stuff just moved around the way it would if this were a series of 800-page doorstoppers; sometimes you gotta move some characters around. Anyway, we’ll see what happens next.