I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]
“What happens when you are worthless in somebody’s eyes”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah was one of my favorite reads last year, and her Purple Hibiscus will be right up there on this year’s list, too. I don’t know how it took so long for me to find her books (correction: yes, I do), but she has quickly become one of my favorite writers. Purple Hibiscus tells the story of the Achike family through the eyes of Kambili, a young girl. Papa rules the family with an iron grip, infantilizing and militarizing and terrorizing his […]
My apology to women authors (with an assist from Amy Poehler)
I have to start this review with a confessional sidenote. As I went to choose my next read after Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, I ended up with a pool of five potential books, eventually settling on the second in the series of memoirs by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I’d read the first last year and wanted to get to this next one before I let too much time pass. But as I started to read, something was nagging at me, so I went down my list of […]
More things should be full of win
I was expecting something more in the fantasy realm from Tigerman, given Nick Harkaway’s first two novels, and although there is the titular superhero, this book stays much more grounded, more of an existential thriller with military and cloak-and-dagger elements, and for that, it’s a lot of thought-provoking fun. The story takes place on a mythical island in the Arabian Sea, an island previously controlled by the British and French, among others, but which has become an environmental disaster due to chemical companies pumping toxic […]
Haunted by the ghosts of the living
I’m having a hard time writing a review for Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair. It’s a book that defies easy summarization; even the cover synopsis doesn’t really describe the book I read and probably did more harm than good to my understanding. The story is told in five sections. The first takes place at Oxford during the early 1940’s, with the Blitz in full swing. Two of the characters have a brief affair, giving the book’s title its first meaning. The second section follows one […]
Like a late-night Cinemax sexy thriller starring Shannon Tweed and Eric La Salle
The only pull-quote on the front cover of this book: “Zakes Mda may have a more central place in South Africa’s literary and political spheres than any other novelist today.” — The New York Times High praise but not surprising, considering his latest novel, Little Suns, had just won the Barry Ronge Prize for Fiction and was featured in every bookstore when I visited Cape Town. A quick Google search confirmed for me that it’s as impressive as it sounds — the country’s biggest prize […]
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