A blog for books

I’ve been involved in a few comical adventures of late, but I feel like writing about books today. So forget about my basketball team’s opening league game loss by 40 points, forget about the hell of a horseback ride I went for (chasing giraffes) that left my hands with blisters from holding on for dear life, & I’ll pause on all that is up & coming to share what I’ve been reading of late.

I thought maybe Google Reads would provide an outlet where I could post on my blog my recent reads. But all of this touring & background information on particular sites makes my head spin…so I’ll do it the old fashioned way*smile*

Quite possibly two of the things I miss most from home- apart from family & friends of course- are: a) a good library, & b) beautiful second hand book stores. I have managed some book swaps that have opened my eyes to books I never would have chosen to read. The advantage of having Zambian friends from well-educated families is that there are bookshelves full of African literature! (Something I never felt I had access to back home). One of my favourite recent authors is Kenyan NGUGI (he has “~ “ those things on top of the “G’s” in his name)*giggling*. I read A grain of wheat & savoured the fact that this author is Kenyan, educated in Uganda. So many of the African authors I’d previously read had been educated outside the continent. I felt Ngugi’s fiction provides a different take on colonial times...& I had just returned from Nairobi so anything Kenyan was/is fascinating. I also read a book whose title escapes me by a female lawyer from Botswana named Unity Dow. Again, an intimate look at African life from an African perspective, & in this case a rarely heard female voice- beautiful!

A second genre; books on Africa by non-Africans

At desperate times, with no other books on my shelf, I finally cracked open Shake hands with the devil. Romeo Dallaire blew me away during my second attempt to read the epic. One of the heaviest books I’ve ever read, but it was a much overdue “must read”. And then there was the bizarre White Masai…so strange that I would love to read the sequels*chuckling*.

Outside of African literature, I’ve been reading everything from David Baldacci to Roddy Doyle & I’m currently racing to finish Heather O’Neill’s lullabies for little criminals set in Montreal. I love that this Canada Reads book ended up in my hands, & that Roddy Doyle’s A Star called Henry took me back to the bleak beginnings of Irelands notorious IRA. Forever a bookworm, I still love been deported to mysterious corners of the world…set in timescapes I’ll never know. Now if only I had more time to read.