Books We Read: 11 Readers on Reading in 2016—Part 3.

This is the third and final part of a piece on Readers on Reading in 2016. If you haven’t, you should read the first and second parts.

Trust F. Òbe

A memorable reading year for me, 2016 is second to none in this ageing decade. From A. Igoni Barret to Yaa Gyasi, the experience of reading Edward P. Jones and Elena Ferrante more than once, knowing the possibilities in African (historical) fiction through the sheer power of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s fiction, and the gift of discovering necessary nonfiction in Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bruce Schneier’s Works.

Very quaintly, 2016 proved to somehow be about America as a dominant world power and this was well-represented, from America winning the Literature Nobel and Man Booker at once to it being clear that Nas could have the same claim to the Nobel for literature as Niyi Osundare. The only way I can expect more from 2017 is in the spirit of full optimism.

Here is a highlight of my notable reads in 2016.

Notable Reads

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev

In a Dele-Giwaesque manner of reportage, Peter Pomerantsev weaves the journalistic and the literary in this brilliant exposé of the new Russia.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible sits comfortably between timely reportage and delayed whistleblowing, revealing the intricacies of modern, layered corruption, lacing the revelation with vignettes of Russia’s history and thus giving a nuanced context and backdrop to the series of unveilings the reader is about to encounter, one is made tellingly aware of the abyssal gamut of opportunities corruption does engender.

From Jambik Hatohov to Solzhenitsyn to Vladimir Putin to how the death of a Russian model in London just three days before her 21st birthday is connected to how a specific part of London (and the UK’s economy) is being targeted and taken over by foreign expats and how countries such as Nigeria (mentioned at least twice in the book) and Turkey seem to be cosplaying but are ultimately coalescing, to hints at why George Orwell’s 1984 owes a great debt to Yevgeny Zamyatin‘s “We” (implying that We is a ‘Classic’s Classic, the way James Salter is a ‘writer’s writer’ and Henry Green is a ‘writer’s writer’s writer.’

If corruption was a game of soccer, this book would be a testament to why Russia is thrice the game player Nigeria is. Both countries are losing, of course—or winning, just in case you’re part of a sacred order of elven folk in a post-GRRM, futuristic adaptation of ASOIAF set right at the heart of Crimea.

Brilliantly taking the reader into a tour that ‘scapegoats’ Russia, considering that there is no uniqueness to the basic form of what the book uncovers, Russia may have a stylistic hang on corruption but theirs is simply a solitary, eclectic reinvention of a phenomenon whose ubiquity is arguably, global. It’s like being introduced to Russian liquor; it is simply easier to personalize the experience than to generalize it. Pomerantsev opens up a global, critical conversation about wealth appropriation through political means, and what it means, or could mean for all the parties (or players, as no one is neutral, not even the innocent, having been forced into becoming the opposition) involved, in terms of benefits, consequences, ramifications and even complications, this particular kind of corruption is a citizen of the world, by way of the new Russia.

H is for Hawk1 by Helen MacDonald

Helen MacDonald’s part, memoir, part tribute, part biography is unpretentious and remarkably intelligent. MacDonald uses clipped precision of diction and a painstakingly well-done intertwining of three different but ultimately related strands of narrative to invite us into her difficult but uniquely personal journey of loss and grief. This exquisitely written but somewhat emotionally tasking read comes with an implication and an unspoken question, how close can one be in a relationship be with anything or anyone; a thing, a pet, someone one has never (and certainly will never meet face to face), a spouse, a relative or anyone for that matter? It proffers an answer I find acceptable: As close as one wants. I would love to reread this book every two years. It’s that unforgettable.

KINTU by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

“Have you seen the moon tonight? She is a thin slice of remnant hope.”

This was how Simi described the moon that crowned the vantablack-dark sky at 9pm on May 5th, 2016. Keep that in mind.

Once in a deep sky-blue moon, you finish a book and marvel.

Kintu is a multigenerational Ugandan epic that begins from the earliest Ugandan ancestry to modern day, cleverly cutting out the period of invasion and colonization. It explores several generations of a polygamous ancestor through the effects of a shared curse.

At once reminiscent of Thomas Mofolo, Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah, Makumbi writes African stories with a cultural profundity that is contemporaneously unmatched and almost inimitable. Imagine a list of the most undervalued novelists from and writing* out of Africa and imagine Makumbi unwittingly and undeservedly holding a membership card. Keep that in mind

Kintu’s place as a timeless epic will take is taking too much time to be rightfully acknowledged, possibly due to the fact that even within Africa, the book has been hard to get outside of East Africa and literary gatherings—the most significant readerly counterincentive I have recently observed.2 In a partly euphoric, partly ironical twist of fate, its much-delayed US publication is due in 2017. Keep that in mind.

Kintu is ‘a thin slice of remnant hope’, a virile attestation to the fact that fiction from Africa still holds what it formerly held, and that lovers of African fiction can now behold – a contemporary epitome of the standards previous generation of African writers upheld – something so long since they last beheld.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

On the book cover, there is a one-line blurb from Alice Seobold. It reads: Elena Ferrante will blow you away! If I wrote that blurb, it would have read: ‘Beware! Elena Ferrante will blow you apart!’

While it isn’t true that Elena Ferrante must blow you away or apart. She should and likely will.

The story of Lenu and Lena is at once quotidian and highbrow, set in Naples, the first of four volumes of delicately written, attentively told, and vividly imagined coming-of-age tale that can leave a reader feeling—in what is likely to feel more like an experience than an activity of intense perusal—catatonic, wallowing in a depth of immersion that is trancelike, you look away from the page and you feel like you’ve just come out of a séance.

In this possible Künstlerroman, the reader is offered a voyeuristic passage into the lives of two friends—an account of friendship that is searing, vivid, unforgettable and gut-smashing all at once—told with mirror-like clarity, leaving you with an almost unavoidable, wickedly compelling sense of faux-nostalgia.

This is the most poignant story of friendship I have encountered since The Shawshank Redemption and before that, Stand By Me.

Data and Goliath3 by Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier is an avenger**, to avoid the general superhero cliché. He might be the closest we currently have to a real-world Tony Stark or Peter Parker—or a hybrid of both, by virtue of what he does on the pages of this book. A Tony Stark earned by virtue of his tech-savviness and a Peter Parker earned, if only by the journalistic quality of his writing, you get the two of them in one of Bruce.

There’s also a fine line that connects Bruce Schneier with Aaron Swartz, who is now of blessed memory, if you know where to look on the same line you might also find some Snow in a den.

While Bruce Schneier is not Edward Snowden, this book is as Snowden as it can get in 400 pages. A book that is as revelatory as 1984 was prophetic. If the book had been released under the title of 2084—as a somewhat more befitting ode to George Orwell’s dystopian classic—not because it owes that book anything in its own right but because these two books unwittingly share a connection—like the connection between two consecutive Best Picture winners, but a little more—it could have turned out to be an unmistakable misrepresentation of the message it bears.

This prophetic nature of 1984 is totally complemented by the revelatory nature of Data and Goliath to the point that it is very safe to say both books are ‘perfect analogues’ of each other—despite and not because of their differences—the way a man is to a woman. Where one is prophetically poignant and subliminally unsettling, the other is acutely revelatory to the point of being almost superliminally instructive. Both books however still retain a marked timeliness, relevance and usefulness to their eras, despite maintaining almost the same degree of integrity.

In a world where corporations and governments misdirect their intentions with the dexterity of Harry Houdini, Schneier shies away from equivocation, from indirectness, from innuendo, from hyperbole and from nonsense****. He tells it the way it is, putting a definitive digital security bible in readers’ hands.

In a line of gatekeepers that may—or may not—have included Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Dele Giwa, Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, Peter Pomerantsev as well as the fictional Elliot Alderson, Bruce Schneier takes a much deserved seat.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

“FiiKiiiiii!”

“FiiiiiiKiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

Ficre Ghebereyesus is at the centre of this totally human, very subliminal memoir of loss, the second in a set of books on loss and grief I read within the last 12 months. This is easily one of the most unforgettable books I read in 2016. Besides acknowledging loss in all its validity and immensity—it’s bold, unruly confrontation and subtle determination to tear you apart by incentivising you with necessary grief.

Liz Alexander takes us through her memories, her low moments and personal struggles—the whole gamut of a healing process centered around intimacy and love.

Memory is a theme that replays frequently, to the honour of her Ficre, and as a testament to a marriage well-spent and a union enviable by every measure. Memories of Eritrean recipes cooked and eaten together, of simple and subtle moments, of places, of people, of tales and things shared, memories of a dual oneness, consecrated by loss, made sacrosanct by demise and glorified by a love that once was, still is and will now certainly forever be—because of and not despite of a transition.

I will have to suffer a serious memory impediment before I can forget Ficre, whom I have come to know as much as the book allowed. Utterly readable, unflinchingly evocative and desperately redemptive. I have recommended this book to more people than any other this year and I will not hesitate to do so again.

The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward

Racheal Kaadzi Ghansah’s moving essay—part tribute, part recollection and part invocation—to of and about James Baldwin is a discursive, necessary and timely piece of deserved canonization. Considering the title of the anthology is a Tribute to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

Wendy S. Walters’ personal inquisition about the remains of indentured African slaves in Modern day America which took her on repeated journeys to New Hampshire and Portsmouth is the basis of her deep, revealing essay which gives substance and deep posthumous honour to the memory of African slaves who were “carried like chattel on ships to America; sold to other people; stripped of their names, spiritual practices, and culture; worked their entire lives without just compensation; were beaten into submission and terrorized or killed if they chose not to submit; were buried in the ground at the far edge of town; and as the town grew, roads and houses were built on top of them as if they had never existed.”

Kevin Young and Claudia Rankine’s essays are two of my favorites from this collection. Very personal, intimate reflections of what it means to be black, as in Young’s deconstruction of Racheal Dolezal’s kind of blackness and Rankine’s unapologetic description of black life, written with orgasmic intensity and ferocious veracity, from years and years of experiential observation.

Emily Raboteau’s photojournalistic essay about how five New York boroughs maintain informative vigilance on ensuring police accountability, Jose Older’s futuristic essay about black lives and what it would be worth in posterity and Edwidge Danticat’s reflective piece of how the label of refugee in modern context is employed and deployed against certain race classes make this collection a compulsory read for now, as well as one of epochal relevance later.

Jesmyn Ward’s rightfully indignant preface, as well as her essay about how it is almost impossible for black Americans to construct a family tree going back generations, is part protest, part polemic.

The revelation that comes with Garnette Cardogan’s poignant juxtaposition on walking in a black body on the streets of Jamaica and on the streets of New York is achingly terrifying and ultimately disquieting especially because it could seem very surreal and ultimately unimaginable—which is how we’d rather have it and how it should be—but very sadly is not.

The fire this time is both a response, a testament and an armour, in the face of recent (and current) racial injustices, very necessary and a gift, to self-conscious black people anywhere.

The Cartel by Don Winslow

Netflix’s Narcos is the latest widely-acclaimed take on TV on the war on drugs but allow me to introduce you to Adanito Barrera, the character at the centre of this modern-day crime thriller set primarily in Mexico but runs across three continents for all bad intents and purposes. It had the most satisfying ending of any fiction I read this year, and one of the greatest. This book merges a personal vendetta between two former friends on either side of the law with a gripping inside look at the war on Drugs in Mexico from the viewpoint of every player involved—Youths, Elite Forces, Cartels, Journalists, The Mexican & US governments, Older Citizens, Civil Servants and Rogue Military forces. Only the lucky ones and the death-defiantly brave have the option of choosing a side, that option had been thrust upon everybody else. In a story that shakes you from fiction into reality, this book left the only other crime thriller I read this year—which was set in Lagos—in the dust. It is as thoroughly delightful to read as it was scrupulously-researched. The cartel leaves you better than it met you.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Simply one of the best debuts of any African writer in the past decade. Yaa Gyasi’s novel explores several generations descended from two sisters, from a city in Ghana to several cities in the United States. Using little vignettes from the lives of particular descendants, Gyasi deftly executes a story that a far less disciplined writer would have made, unforgivably into a needless tome. The writing is beautiful, not without inadequacies but perhaps the strongest thing that Homegoing brilliantly does is spin a concentric web of a shared maternal bloodline, while deftly using that to explore the ravaging effects of slavery and enslavement, questioning accepted norms about the implicit culpability of the colonized and making a well-informed polemic about displacement and resettlement, racial tensions, gender inequality and above all, the toxicity of privilege. Homegoing redeems itself ten times over for every single flaw you’ll squint to discover. Alongside Kintu, this text should be required reading within Africa, as well as anywhere else where there is great taste in African historical fiction.

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Borne out of eagle-eyed observation of racial tension, violence and seemingly innocuous but morally debilitating stereotypical assumptions based solely on race, yet suffused in verses at once elegiac and graceful, devoid of the indignant overtone you’d expect from a black writer writing about black inequality and injustices, the collection reads like a testament than an indictment. Its sheer force and hypnotic poignancy are not its hallmarks, it is its almost inimitable portrayal of racial prejudices in America that makes this gem compulsively rereadable and a contemporary classic. Rankine does with Citizen, what Ta-Nehisi Coates did with Between the World and Me.

“Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.”

Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe

In a year that saw the release of at least two other widely acclaimed debuts; Ocean Vuong’s Whiting Award-winning Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the comprehensive, brilliant and formidable, National Book Award-winning Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis, Sarah Howe’s debut collection stands out in style and form. A collection that weaves intricate, cross-cultural allusions together with deep, uniquely richly-complex duple metaphors, Howe distills her intelligence with a fiendish erudition which is only matched this year by that of Robin Coste Lewis’, sometimes making for an unflinching test of the reader’s noesis. I picked up five new words from this collection. My favourites: quincunx and quadroon.

I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek

As creative and original as it is irreverently funny, this is not the tokenistic satire you’ve come to expect from writers desperate for an attempt at social commentary. Jarrett Kobek defiantly points out things in his own distinctive manner, emphatically repetitive and stubbornly inventive, he is prismatic where another writer would be content with being kaleidoscopic. A work of full savage satire, the depth of which is only rarely surpassed. He imagines a futuristic world where the internet has more stakes in reality and the shows how we are currently implicit in creating that world. In both styleand form, Kobek dishes out a cynical but compelling criticism of popular culture, racial tensions, the dangers yet to come on the internet and human nature, what you get is a book that slowly packs a concatenation of punches, each as enfeebling as the ones before and after, knocking down the gigantic opponent that the readiness with which we deny our own culpability in the state of the world today has become.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates has predecessors in Olaudah Equiano, James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon and he is still as original as any of them. Coates’ book is written as a three-part letter to his young son—a mature dissection of the current wave of racial injustices and what it takes, means and requires to own, be in and hope to maintain a black body in modern-day America. In graceful, luminous and conscientious prose, this seminal book reads like a sacred text and feels like a first-person shooter videogame. We are all Coates’ young son as it turns out, as we get all of his loving, tender, fatherly guidance and a deeper, keenly-observed dimension into the deep-seated racial classism that has awakened to represent the recurring generational canker that it has—sometimes sleepily but overall—consistently been for over a century. This is the most important book I read all year.

Favourite Articles

Notable Mentions

 

Looking Forward to Read in 2017

Not Worth the Hype

And After Many Days by Jowhor Ile

If this book was an orchard, the flowers in it certainly die faster than they grow. You have in your hands a novel which the sum of all its parts add up to a fraction of its whole. In a work that treats the quotidian without scope, ambition, finesse or panache, it is almost a mismatch of ideas, a book that suffers from a frailty of plot coherence that made some of its tolerable parts needlessly long and the worse ones, unrepentantly boring, even though you’ll find a couple of beautiful sentences in strange passages like you’ll find Riddler’s trophies in Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you read only the first and the last twenty-five pages, the saying that no knowledge is lost will hold true of the book in a literal sense in this case. Wait for the lazily-contrived denouement, which ends the endurance test that I found this book to be. No spoilers, you are welcome to take the test.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Liz Strout’s latest book isn’t exactly a page-turner, even though I turned every one of its pages without respite or consolation. In this experimental novel, two characters babble back and forth about their past. You’re expected to feel the implied weight of emotion in the whole experience but this seems like something one cannot do without first ascending the alps for six months of austere living to elevate the mind towards the border between sanity an insanity, a place where this book might really be fun to read. Reading this novel was a joyless experience for me. It was like taking a long ride to the beach to find out the beach is closed. A Bailey’s Prize, and then for a lack of restraint, Man Booker contender. It lost to Lisa McInerney’s much better book and didn’t make the shortlist of the latter, an award for which I will say it was carelessly, if not unworthily, longlisted. This novel feels impoverished in comparison to other books that have similarly unlikable—but contrastingly, deeply felt—characters such as Penny Busetto’s The Story of Anna P and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. My name is not Lucy Barton.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Under the Udala Trees is the only novel I have read that set an LGBT story at the backdrop of the Nigerian civil war. Something is commendable about the book and that is what it tries to do. I do welcome novelistic ambitions but when they are followed with a lazy writerly cathexis, (in this case of an LGBT discrimination and persecution story built against the chaos of the well-storied Nigerian Civil War) a visibly perfunctory novel is born. This birth, which admittedly, is a birth before it is any other thing is one riddled with undeniable congenital abnormalities. A plot that is force-fed by nothing but the sheer force of the insistent will of completion. You will find better value for your time in Kim Brooks’ I’m having a Friendship Affair, and that’s not even a novel.

Notes.

Books on Loss and Grief

Books on Security, Surveillance and Big Data

 

Trust is a Netizen, Reader & DeppHead

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Tolase Ajibola

Most of the books I read were recommended by friends and close associates so it can be said that I was not in company of bad books. I read moving books—Wave and The Light of the World moved me close to tears. Some poems moved me that far too—Gbenga Adesina’s Painter of Water. Some books improved my person, Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan taught me not to gamble. 2016 has been wonderful.

Notable Reads

Home by Toni Morrison

Home is short. This book tries to take out the idea of a locked position in my thought of home. Frank Money, a war veteran who went to war with two other friends—who died at war—is going home. He received a letter that informed him of his sister’s deteriorating health, only then did his sister become the home he was to return to.

The Double by Jose Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

The Double is full of surprises. A depressed history teacher slips a recommended movie—by his colleague—into the VCR to discover an actor—playing a minor role—who looks the way he did some years back, that was the beginning of surprises. The narrative technique employed allowed me to interfere in the decisions of Tertuliano, which movies should he rent—the recent ones or older ones by the same production company, what to tell his girlfriend when she asked about the movies, why he shouldn’t wear a false beard when meeting his double. The double was so graphic I thought it was from my memory.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was… so began The Black Swan.

Why do—or don’t—you gamble? If one engages a gambler in a conversation, the logic of gambling will seem simple, that is, predicting or forecasting the future from past occurrences. Not only gamblers work with forecasts, brokers too, this means that their job is to predict market behaviour based on it past behaviours. It is plausible, isn’t it? Now, here is a black swan: The past tells us nothing about the future. So are brokers fraud? An example of a black swan event is 9/11, what previous event could has predicted the occurrence?

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

What motivated me to read Wave was an essay in Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, A Better Quality of Agony. When I read the essay, I thought of how impossible it was for someone to acquire most of the grief the world can give in one day or how else does one describe the loss of all that one has come to know as love. Sonali in her memoir writes about the Tsunami that claimed the life of her father, mother, husband and two sons in a way that one comes to own her grief too. I think that no circle has more warmth or offers more love than family. Wave tells of what it means to lose family. The story is in two part: one is of loss, how a woman lost all that she has treasured in a tsunami in Sri Lanka. How her world shrunk and the other is her path to rediscovery.

Sonali was raised in Sri Lanka, educated in England where she met Stephen who she later got married to and had her two sons with. Sonali and her family lived in London. Her parents lived in Sri Lanka and thus they visit often, what would later be a solo voyage. In December 2004, during their holiday in Sri Lanka, their resort was hit by a tsunami. After the event she was found naked, the event had ripped her off all she held dear. The event was so grave she couldn’t ask people to assist in her search for the fear that things might get real. What followed was her path towards healing, how she couldn’t live in their London home or tell her children’s classmates they died and her suicidal thoughts. How she relives the memory they made, and how remembering healed when she finally moved back into their London home.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

“In which Ficre died” is a title I would have suggested. The light of the world is a voyage around an immigrant from Eritrea, Ficre Ghebereyesus, an artist, he takes wine, he takes aspirin three times a week—“baby aspirin are supposed to prevent heart attack”—but Ficre died from an attack. Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir puts us in the company of Ficre—her husband—his Eritrean recipe and his paintings. One could feel the radiating love of Ficre until the moment he was found dead by a running treadmill.

Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole

Teju writes of the things he knows, literature and photography, in which we come into the knowledge of creative processes. Known and Strange Things have three sections apart from the epilogue – Reading Things, Seeing Things and Being there. In Reading Things where his opinion about the writings of others and his conversations with other writers are voiced, his writing can be said to have been from keen observation.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The book opens with an introduction to two systems, System1 which operates quickly with little or no effort or no sense of voluntary effort operates automatically and While System2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities, an example is solving complex mathematical problems. An example of System1 operation is identifying a person’s mood from their facial expression. Usually, System1 is automatic and thus humans make decisions without thorough thinking which could lead to erroneous decisions.

Thinking Fast and Slow has influenced my decision making process. Often I delay System1 response while System2 works, that way I get to compare the decisions of both systems although there are times System1 just jumps in.

Painter of Water by Gbenga Adesina

Painter of Water is a journey through Gbenga’s lenses to Africa, a water painted with blood and tears. Gbenga Adesina’s control of language helped to create images that will remain in my head for a long time. With Gbenga I went to places, landmarks, where history is made—Christmas in Chibok, Borno where the painter is. These journeys are anachronistic though, but I felt like I was there with the daughters of widows in their science schools where they were abducted, 200 of them.

The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward

I am convinced Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time will be a focal point of discussion around race. Amazingly, it is 2016 and we are still talking about racism, will we ever stop? Jesmyn Ward’s anthology addresses issues around race in a time when black bodies get shot at because their identity is mistaken—if it is right to say mistaken—for violence. The book reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and it can be said that there is just a little difference between the two non-fiction texts. The book addresses the issues of racial equality in a manner that has the semblance of Baldwin. It is not a book of unforgivings, rather just grievances, that in 2016 our geography still has the semblance of Baldwin’s—not much has changed.

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

Read my review here.

Looking Forward to Read in 2017

Tolase Ajibola lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Niyi Ademoroti

Maybe sometime during the second month of the year, I decided to read only short story collections. I was tired of the tepid encounters I had with novels, how on the axis that represented enjoyment the line always deepened somewhere in the middle. Also, I was going to have a desk job. I needed stories I could finish before leaving for work, during lunch, the short free time between dinner and sleep. Another thing I set out to do was read stories by masters. No genre writing and nothing not authored by a literary giant.

Of course, it would take an extremely disciplined fellow, something I am absolutely not, to follow through these two things. So I read a couple of novels, a few by Achebe and another which gripped me through work assignments by Tobias Wolff. I also read a couple of letters, diaries, a collection of interviews, none of which you will find in this review because it didn’t occur to me to consider them—wrote out the review before typing out this preface. A couple of debuts found their way into my library. I loathed some and I loved one.

So, yeah, there it is. The summary or idea behind my reading experience this year.

Notable Reads

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

It is always refreshing to see into the mind of a villain. More so when the villain is a degenerate. What’s most refreshing is that Fuckhead narrates with a passive indifference. He’s not telling you his story to get your pity. It is not for your affection either. He’s telling it because you need to know—why else do we tell stories? A review of this book would be incomplete without mentioning the surrealism of its prose. The way it treads the path of both the physical and the supernatural. Leaning ferns on drifting roads in forests and blooming flowers in the middle of a desert. And the structure of the sentences. God. Such a perfect book.

Cathedral/What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

I’ve always known the things which look the easiest are the most difficult to achieve. Quick joke: I dare you to prove 1 + 1 equals two.

Seriously though, Carver’s prose is so easy to digest. It is like water and sugar, maybe even ice-cream: It melts on the tongue and goes down easy. And his subjects. The normal average life. Women and men in lonely marriages dancing on lawns. Birthday boys with broken heads. It is always difficult to explain what makes the mundane beautiful. It is something Carver does so well.

Drown by Junot Díaz

What’s not to love about this one? I remember reading Fiesta, 1980—which I still believe has ties to Murakami’s Nausea, 1979—and going, this is the master in whom I am well pleased. The language is the most startling thing about Junot Díaz’s writing but I also love how emotive the stories are. How you can’t help but feel for a childhood. Empathize so deeply with characters.

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg

Self-awareness means a lot to me. I love it when people are aware of what makes them them, their amazingness, their shortcomings. You’ll read a Deborah Eisenberg story and you’ll meet people who are aware, to the minutest detail, why they feel what they feel. It is incredible. Also, the solitary feeling of the characters is another thing I can relate with. How they make mistakes and forgive themselves.

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

I have a thing for prose which presents itself simple. That which glides silently in the mind, and you don’t realize you’re an hour deep. Yeah, that. Also, I have a thing for surrealism. Not exactly supernatural, magic, but not reality either. I have this belief that reality is calculated. It is a false thing, yellow. Aren’t the things we put out airs?

Anyway. Murakami. I read someplace—can’t remember where, or what exactly it was I read, even—that no writer has a more private body of work than Murakami. A lot of his stories are difficult to find root of. But, God, do they leave a dent. I remember reading A Poor Aunt Story and recognizing. What, I’m not sure of. The stories here are calm, beautiful. They remind me of music, in that it is a personal thing to the singer, but you’re a part of it, you’re being included. Yeah.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander

Haha. I remember reading a review of this and someone saying he didn’t like the book because he felt like the writer was showing off, like, “Oh I’m good, I’m an awesome writer, in your face!” I’d show off too if I could write that well.

When someone can do seriousness and humor with the same level of deftness, how will you not love the person? Read The Twenty-seventh Man, then Reb Kringle, and see just what it is I’m talking about. This book is so good.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I read maybe five novels this year. Here’s why: Novels demand attention; I’m not crazy for saying that, right? They go on and on and on. Everyone knows a short story is perfect from beginning to end. Every word is precise. No excess. Novels? With their tepid middles? No, thank you.

Homegoing though, a punch from start to finish. Was so touching it was easy to forgive the archetypical characters. I cried and laughed and went, “What the fuck is that?” Homegoing was a delight to read.

The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor

I remember finishing The Lame Shall Enter First and going: “What the actual faaaack?” Flannery O’Connor IS a masterrrrrrr. Damn! The way she explores how lost people are in their own heads, religion, parentage, it is magic. Her metaphors and lessons, the way she shows her hands in her stories, the confidence. How do you write a review on a book you loved when you loved everything?

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Alice Munro somehow manages to pack the content of a novel into a short story. I’ll be damned if I knew how.

The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie

This is not the first time I’m proclaiming my love for Ann Beattie, so I’ll let it be brief: I love her characterization, how real they are and how much they know.

I especially loved this book because you can see her progression from the ’70s to the 2000s. Good becoming great. It is a marvel.

Not Worth the Hype

Niyi Ademoroti is an estate surveyor who spends all of his free time either reading or tweeting. He hates everything else (and even tweeting, too).

  1. H is for hawk was the first of a set of books on Loss and Grief I read in the last 12 months↩
  2. I feel grateful to Tope Salaudeen-Adegoke for sending me his copy of Kintu in April and also sharing the article by Akin Adesokan.↩
  3. Data and Goliath was the sixth of six books I read on Security, Surveillance and Big Data, part of what has now become a habit of reading at least six books on at least one chosen theme over a 12-month period.↩

2 thoughts on “Books We Read: 11 Readers on Reading in 2016—Part 3.”

  1. Pingback: Books We Read: 11 Readers on Reading in 2016 Part 1 | read.i.ng
  2. Pingback: Books We Read: 11 Readers on Reading in 2016—Part 2. | read.i.ng

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