Month: March 2025

I read this book for a book club. It’s a solid survey of Black literature, art, and music. It’s strength is in the way the author ties her life and family history to the works she writes about. She writes about writers who are already quite well known (many of which I’d already read, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass). They’re all writers worth writing about, but these days I’m looking for obscurity, writers and artists and musicians I’ve never heard of before in books like this. Much of the book was me agreeing, yes, yes, this writer is worth reading. For someone who hadn’t, though, I think this book is a solid introduction to them.

We is a dystopian science fiction novel that almost certainly inspired 1984 and Brave New World. Written by a Russian author in the early 20th centuries, it has the distinct honor of being the first novel censored by the Soviet literary review board.

We presents a society that is rigorously controlled and observed, with everything from work and food to people’s sex lives dictated by the state for the greater good. Also, there’s a rocket in it. Everything would be perfect apart from individuals and their imagination, which the society has built a machine to relatively painlessly remove.

Anyway, it’s the story of a worker who drifts into a resistance movement through his fascination with a young woman who continually breaks the rules. The whole thing is pretty bleak, but I liked reading this science fiction book from the early 20th century. Ultimately pretty apolitical, I could easily see the setting of this book mapped onto an extreme version of capitalism.

It was also quite interesting to see how the author imagined telephones being used in the future, as well as rockets.

That cover is something else, too!