I Decided to Read 200 Books This Year, And This Is What Has Happened So Far — Part 3 of 26

I took a break. I took about five days off because the reading was altering me somewhat. It is expected. I have been consuming information and exposing myself to various thoughts and ideas all through these weeks, and I have found my mind drifting into unknown parts while I ran my errands. I would start a thought somewhere and finish it off sixteen ideas away. What I have been doing with this speed reading, is consuming information without thinking about it. 7 weeks later, I feel more confident.

I really want to thank the readers of this blog. It is not much but it is honest work. I figured out that this place should be a journal for my journey through these 200 Books. I want to intimate that I am making it up as I go. I believed having a list of books to read would help, and while it does, I could start 5 books at the same time and finish them off, divide and conquer sort of thing, the spontaneity keeps me exploring the new worlds am exploring. This year, I am reading for the sake of reading and not for the pursuit of knowledge, so there.

If you want to catch up with what I have been doing, hit this link to read the previous entry.

Now, shall we begin with the Eight

17. Solving Product Design Exercises: Questions & Answers, Artom Dashinsky

By day, I am a content creator/writer but by night, I am a product designer. I picked this book up while interacting with other product designers and, suffice to say, I have learned a lot. I always believe product design was about the designing of the product. It is deeper than designing good software for users apparently. This book also revealed to me that I needed to do more to get a job in product design. Product Thinking is what I was missing. The word was very familiar.

Dashinsky does a great work of demystifying the questions that Product Designers will be asked during interviews. I enjoyed the questions and the way he answered them. Dashinsky would make you fearless when it comes to designing an interface. And then he expands your idea of design out of the screen, something school did not spend too much time teaching us.

Learning:

It is a good time to be an author. There is massive support for you should you decide to share your knowledge with the world through a book.

18. In Dependence, Sarah Ladipo Manyika

This was the first book from Manyika that I read. I am not disappointed. I was miffed at the ending but once I got over that initial anger, I still felt it could have ended better. I have tried hard not to say the story could be Marquez’s Love in The Time of Cholera. Eternal Love that is only consummated just before death will forever top the billboard charts of story theses worldwide. I chose to focus instead, on the things she did that were new.

I won’t say her style is particularly refreshing. It is adequate. As for the ideas in the book, she stroked them more than she dug into them. And that is okay. Modern fiction doesn’t try to dig into the bottom glass of ideas. Authors have to churn out books quickly. Sad but what can we do.

Manyika distills a key part of Nigeria’s history that concerns the Nigerian youth. In Dependence basically describes what the life of a Nigerian activist entailed in the 20th Century. There were large swathes of themselves that they sacrificed to do what they did. And it scared me a little thinking about it, thinking about the things I would lose if I was ever called to join the fight for a country’s freedom. Would all of the awards, accolades, and satisfaction of rescuing a country from deterioration fill the hole left by losing the love of my life? I truly do not think so.

I recommend In Dependence, not for its quality because I clearly have standards too high, but for the earnestness of its writing. I could feel the restraint of a writer trying not to sound like their debut novel.

Learning:

Here, I like that some Nigerian writers are writing bits from our history into their fiction. One could use this to teach literature to Senior School Students.

19. Nutshell, Ian McEwan

Nutshell was a funny book. And it is certainly a book I will pick up again. The first McEwan book that I read was his 1998 Man Booker prize-winning Amsterdam, which many of us would agree that the prize was not given out of merit. McEwan carries on with even more brilliant writing in this book. I liked the attitude he wrote with and the spirit the narrator in this piece of fiction brought to the pages.

Beautiful ending. Great pacing. I was wolfing the book down, unable to drop it, feeling guilty that I was not dancing to the music of the writing. This is modern McEwan, doing his thing and being free on the page. One of Nutshell’s strongest points is the narrative machinery. It is an idea that a writer can do no wrong with, an interesting perspective that only a terrible writer can screw up. In the hands of McEwan, it only shines brilliantly.

Learning:

Just a thought. The more confident a writer is, the better the writing might be.

20. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

This is my favorite novel in the world. I consider it a 10/100, a 5/5, and the ultimate guide for how to weave music through words. Winner of the 1992 Man Booker prize, along with Scarlet, The English Patient is the book that ruined my writing and had me considering other options. Thankfully, I am back and better and now that I write this, I just want to open this book and read it again.

There is so much to say but I will keep it short.

Like every excellent novel, it changes with every read. It was first a geographical manual of North Africa. Then it became a love story between Almasy and Katharine on my second read. Last week, The English Patient opened up the characters of Hana and Kip to me. I had only eyes for them. I read as if I was meeting these characters the first time. There is so much going on in this novel that one discovers something they did not see. About The English Patient, another novelist once said that it felt like Ondaatje wrote a story and then removed parts of it to leave only the most condensed form. I hope to write something with this kind of power.

Learning:

Read The English Patient.

Week 2, or as I like to call it; the time after the palate-cleansing novel.

21. Of Africa, Wole Soyinka

Coming off Ondaatje’s powerful novel, my standards were already high and Soyinka re-educated me on why he was Nobel laureate. Of Africa hangs at the top of the top ten books I have read so far. only a person with Soyinka’s pedigree can write something like this. I read this book with Google searches, pinches of sugar not salt, exclamations all the way through. Heavily bookmarked, is the first word I’ll describe my soft copy with.

In summary, Of Africa is about Africa and how much the world does not know about Africa. I remember a story in Mastering English, a middle school English textbook, that was titled ‘The Dark Continent’. Reading Of Africa was a throwback to discovering how much of Africa was unknown to everyone, even Africans themselves. If there was ever a perfect book for Black History Month, it would be Soyinka’s Of Africa.

Soyinka writes this, about Africa from an African perspective, starting by immersing the reader in a brief history of what Africans have tried to do about Africa and removing any taste of Eurocentrism that usually flavours essays about Africa. I felt a great sense of pride reading this. And then leads us down the bastardization of Africa by the white overlords and then into the tip of the iceberg that is what Africa has to offer. On closing this book, i immediately felt that this would be the year I wound down the African Writer’s Series instead.

Yes, I may just do that.

Learning:

One who marvels at how much they do not know still retains conceit akin to one who thinks they know everything.

22. Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khong

Oh, I wished this was the worst book I read this week. It sure felt like the lowest point but it wasn’t. That surprised me.

Goodbye Vitamin is a story pilfered from the diary of an uninteresting character that cares for a father, who is riddled with Alzheimer’s diseases, while she heals from a relationship that we, the readers, aren’t too sure of why ended. There was so much fluff, with the only bright spots being when something was being done about the father’s condition and whenever the mother was in the scene. Frankly, I’ll rather read a story about the mother than have this on my shelf.

The narrative mechanism did not do well for this story. I thought it was cowardly of the writer to use this. it could have been a far more powerful book if they had actually done the work of telling the story they had, rather than have a character react to the story for 250+ pages. It was annoying and it wasted my time far more than it should have. The writing was subpar and lacked the emotional punch it thought it was carrying.

But I guess it is on the shelves anyway. So…

Learning:

It is better to be criticized for bravery than for cowardice.

23. Pure Color, Sheila Heti

No!

Just, no!

This has been the lowest point of my year. I consider Heti’s Pure Color a non-printable. I do not know why books like these keep getting published and I think that there is a generational weakness in the literary industry. This was a bland wall of text with a lack of style and would have been better if we had known it was bad from the beginning. I think all the 5-star, 4-star reviews on Goodreads were paid for, and what the hell was that about the leaf? It took too large a chunk of the books and it did not make any sense.

I was livid at the last sentence. Just how much meth does one have to do to make this book good?

Learning:

It is better to leave a book half-reed than finish it and become the offended reader.

24. The Sex Lives of African Women, Nana Darkoa Sekiyamah

I came to this book expecting some tea on African women but apparently, the definition of African women is quite loose these days. I do not want to be the one that would point out that this book is populated with mixed-race women and that misrepresents most of the African women I know. I understand why in a book that examines, opens up the sex lives of women, we won’t find the ‘pureblood’ African women. Most African cultures are not that expressive or openly communicative with strangers about sex. If they are, the early missionaries have bullied them out of it.

Africa is a secret place and it may continue to remain so. Africa is a place where you come to worship, transform yourself and leave. it is not a treasure chest to steal from.

Also, for the few dark-skinned ‘pureblood’ African women who were represented here, their stories were filled with pain, disrespect and showed just how much colorism has eaten away at the true identity of humanity. It is sad, it is sickening, and we need to do better. Men need to do better to make up for this too.

Rant over, now we can engage.

I like the realness of the writing. The stories of these women weren’t edited to look good. Their personalities shone brightly, a testament to the masterful editing of this non-fiction. We’re looking at a slice of humanity here. Weaknesses camouflaged as strength, PTSD transforming into self-knowledge. It’s beautiful and sad at the same time. The subjectiveness of the experiences here is palpable. This is a neat quality for any documentation of human stories. Subjectivity, that is.

I kept yearning for more stories about Black women I encounter daily, the ones that makeup over 90% of African women worldwide, the ones that never left Africa and can tell you about the African Experience, core African black women with black skin because so far, I had been reading about mixed-race upper-class women who could afford to switch countries, an experience a majority do not relate with.

More of this though. More stories about African women.

Learning:

Representation will trickle down to everyone, but that also means we can break the faucet and let it flood. Do what you will.

Final Note

I feel like I may have been too brash, too forward too thick with the critiquing. I feel like I have let my bad character show and exposed just how judgemental I can be. It is not a quality I am comfortable with. I promised to see the bright side of things and retract my claws on starting this project. But the truth is, I have had a stressful two weeks and despite there being a war, the sedimentation of ugliness in the ocean of humanity is murking up the waters. I will find peace though.

Thank you for reading and see you in another fortnight.

I love you all!