Jama is a naive market boy who travels from Yemen to Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea to Sudan to Egypt to Palestine and eventually to Britain before he tries to make his way back home. Oops, I guess I should have given a spoiler’s alert. I’ll start over. It’s 1935 and we are in Yemen […]
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I was not impressed with Memories of My Melancholy Whores but this One Hundred Years of Solitude is thought of as Gabriel García Márquez’ masterpiece therefore I decided to give him another go. It was initially published in Spanish in 1967 and has been widely translated since. It is a metaphoric history of Columbia told […]
Beloved by Toni Morrison
I wrote previously that Beloved was essentially my introduction to the horrors of American slavery and to the complexities of American history and racism in America. I read it in my second year in the United States, while taking AP American History in 11th grade high school. Written in 1987, it won author Toni Morrison […]
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
The title of this book evokes the image of the eponymous red and blue striped waterproof plastic bags ubiquitous in Ghanaian households. They are so called because in 1983 Nigeria sacked a couple hundred thousand West Africans from their country, the majority being Ghanaian, giving them only a couple weeks to make their exist and […]
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Strength in What Remains was a book recommendation for physicians. It tells the story of Deogratis Niyizonkiza who leaves what would have been a promising life behind when as a 24 year old medical student he has to flee war-torn French-speaking Burundi for the streets of New York City with only $200 in his pocket […]
The Sex Lives of African Girls by Taiye Selasi
The African Women’s Book Club was supposed to read Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor but most found it hard to get through, if they had started it at all. So a short story was recommended in its place so that when we met we would have something to talk about while enjoying each others dishes. […]
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don’t you hate it when you know you have read a book or watched a film but cannot remember the story-line? I’m pretty sure I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a teenager. One of those classics in the book section of the dollar store. I know I did not read his The Brother’s Karamazov […]
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing: A Novel by Mira Jacob
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing has a title that screams out “read me”. So I did! I happened upon it while browsing library e-books to download to my Kindle and overall I wasn’t disappointed. I did find it tediously boring in the first few chapters as the plot was being built. I couldn’t bring myself […]
The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Some books have been on my to-read list and my physical bookshelf for so long I don’t even know what prompted me to pick them up in the first place. This is one of them. The Namesake, published in 2003, is the first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian-American author who had already won the […]
Top 10 Influential Books in my Life
I usually ignore social media challenges but today I was challenged by a good friend on Facebook to share my ten most influential books. This friend likes to read the kind of non-fiction books that a college professor of any discipline would choose to assign for his courses. As you can clearly see from my […]
A lover of mangoes. A woman - smart, without pretense, lefthanded, Afropolitan - navigating this thing called life. An unapologetic believer in social justice and karma. Choosing to radiate positive energy and be true to myself. Here, my musings.