‘Americanah’ is the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who in college, falls in love with a boy, Obinze. They come from different backgrounds…his mother is a high minded academic, a college professor. Her parents are much more working class, living with the issues of power outages and so on. They fall deeply in love, but amongst the constant strikes in the college, it becomes almost impossible for them to graduate from college, so she moves to the United States, where her aunt has invited her. She is an excellent student and gets scholarships, but still she owes plenty of money on tuition and living costs. She’s suffering. Things…

(artwork found on the New York Times website, here) “They say there are many worlds, all around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons and stars. We cannot go there — we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own. . . . And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged, and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had…

“Little Bee” is the name chosen for herself by a young Nigerian girl running from “the men” who have come to burn her village and kill its occupants, so that the oil field below may be developed.  She takes the name to hide her identity, as her real name would clearly identify her as a member of a particular family, all of whom are supposed to be dead.  Little Bee has lived a happy life in an impoverished village, where there is no running water or electricity, but there is a tire swing and a lot of fun to be had.  When the village is destroyed by the men, she…

Graphic found on the New York Times review of the book, here. The preface of Amor Towles Rules of Civility finds our heroine, Katey, and her husband attending the opening of a photography exhibit in Manhattan, in 1966. The exhibit is of photographs taken with a hidden camera on the subways, some 25 years before. She is stunned to find, amongst all of the other photographs, two of a man she recognizes, Tinker Grey. In the first picture, he is wearing a custom shirt and a cashmere coat, and is clearly enjoying life. In the second, taken perhaps a year later, he looks as though he hasn’t had enough to…

Any system of slavery must be abolished. It had seemed simple in England; yet in Ohio that principle was chipped away at, by economic arguments, by personal circumstances, by deep-seated prejudice that Honor sensed even in Quakers. Honor has traveled from her home and family in England, hoping for a new life in the new world. Her sister is engaged to be married to a man who works with his brother in their general store in a small Quaker town in 1850 Ohio, and Honor has decided to go along with her. Circumstances change quite a bit between the sisters leaving home and arriving in Ohio, and Honor finds herself…

picture found here PARSIFAL IS DEAD. That is the end of the story. The technician and the nurse rushed in from their glass booth. Where there had been a perfect silence a minute before there was now tremendous activity, the straining sounds of two men unexpectedly thrown into hard work. The technician stepped between Parsifal and Sabine, and she had no choice but to let go of Parsifal’s hand. When they counted to three and then lifted Parsifal’s body from the metal tongue of the MRI machine and onto the gurney, his head fell back, his mouth snapping open with no reflexes to protect it. Sabine saw all of his…

Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I…

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was…

Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox, found here. The Guardian has an interesting feature, where they distilled the admittedly short novella into just a few paragraphs, all while pretty much keeping the voice. Don’t read it if you’re going to read the book, obviously. “Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary,…

Absolutely appropriate cartoon perhaps via Yoe! Books, though found on FB She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him. Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the…

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Perhaps I read The Great Gatsby in High School. I have vague recollections of spending time my Sophomore year listening to my…

The unnamed narrator of Meg Rosoff’s What I Was is an old man, 100 years old, telling the story of the happiest time in his life, when he was a teenager in the mid 1960s, attending a horrid boarding school near the ocean in the eastern U.K. It’s not that the school is so wonderful, it’s the friend he makes, Finn, who lives in a shack by the ocean, fishes for meals, gathers wood, and does odd jobs in town for the little money needed to survive. The narrator (some refer to him as H) is drawn to Finn, wishes he could live this simple lifestyle, free from interfering parents,…