Nicely bookended with what turned out to be my favourite essays, "Northwest London Blues" and "Joy" (my absolute favourite of the bunch), the majority of the rest of them - though it absolutely pains me to say it - in my opinion, were just very...meh. I know, I know, I'm cringing at myself just for typing that. Again, let me stress that this is just my personal opinion.
Such is the challenge of books of essays - to the reader, some will stick to the ceiling while others will stick to the floor. While I liked how the essays were categorically grouped, I was either not engaged with many of them because I didn't know anything about the subjects that she was writing about, I didn't grasp many of her references, and/or the subject matter simply didn't hold much personal interest for me (such as most of the content of "In the Gallery" and, surprisingly, some of the pop culture pieces, which were the ones I thought I'd most identify with, barring Jay-Z. More Jay-Z, please!).
While no one can dispute the quality of Zadie Smith's writing, it was so highbrow that much of it seemed out of my reach. (Again, cringing that I'm writing this.) To dumb it down, a lot of the writing made me feel, well, dumb. (Common? Uneducated? Not worldly enough?) While I could clearly see there was much to be taken away from the subject matter and Zadie's input and observations, I just wasn't getting many of the references of either the subjects or the contexts that she lay out on the pages. Even so, some of the pieces meandered on for so long, I started to lose interest and felt that if they were half their length, I could have possibly been more invested and a spark of interest may have ignited.
That said, she's still one of the most intriguing writers out there and I love her fiction writing, though I clearly need to do some extensive catch-up on the matters of the world before tackling more of her non-fiction pieces.
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