Diversity Spotlight Thursday# November 10th

Diversity Spotlight Thursday is a weekly feature hosted by Aimal at Bookshelves and Paperbacks . Please click on this link to get more details about the feature.

To take part all you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. A diverse book you have read and enjoyed
2. A diverse book that has already been released but you have not read
3. A diverse book that has not yet been released

A Book that I Have Read

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman.

And while he’s not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it.

Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mix tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But he can’t stay on the sideline forever. Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.

I read this book last week and fell in love with it and the characters. It covers so many different themes such as mental health issues and homosexuality. It is about being different and accepted. You can read my review here.

A Book on my TBR

Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John

In the far reaches of northwestern Nigeria, Dantala lives among a gang of street boys who sleep under a kuka tree. During the election, the boys are paid by the Small Party to cause trouble. When their attempt to burn down the opposition’s local headquarters ends in disaster, Dantala must run for his life, leaving his best friend behind. He makes his way to a mosque that provides him with food, shelter, and guidance. With his quick aptitude and modest nature, Dantala becomes a favored apprentice to the mosque’s benevolent sheikh. But before long, he is faced with a terrible conflict of loyalties. His mother is dying back in his native village, his brothers have joined a rival sect, and one of the sheikh’s closest advisers begins to raise his own radical movement. As bloodshed erupts in the city around him, Dantala must decide what kind of Muslim—and what kind of man—he wants to be.

Told in Dantala’s naive, searching voice, this astonishing debut explores the ways in which young men are seduced by religious fundamentalism and violence, and how friendship can prove to be the strongest bond of all.

I like the sound of this book especially because it covers aspects of religion and radicalism.

A Book yet to be released

The leavers by Lisa Ko

An emotionally harrowing debut novel that explores assimilation and loss, immigration and homeland, independence and connection.

One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.

With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.” But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.

Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It’s the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.This powerful debut is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.

This book will be published on May 2, 2017. I have requested it on NetGalley but I am still waiting for feedback.

Have you read any of these books?

Happy Thursday

Diversity Spotlight Thursday# Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Diversity Spotlight Thursday is a weekly feature hosted by Aimal at Bookshelves and Paperbacks . Please click on this link to get more details about the feature.

To take part all you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. A diverse book you have read and enjoyed
2. A diverse book that has already been released but you have not read
3. A diverse book that has not yet been released

I am going to bend the rules a bit this week’s post. This post will focus on Chimamanda Adichie’s books. I will highlight three books that I have read and two that are on my TBR.

Books I Have Read

The Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world is circumscribed by the high walls and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home.

When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili’s father sends her and her brother away to stay with their aunt, a University professor, whose house is noisy and full of laughter. There, Kambili and her brother discover a life and love beyond the confines of their father’s authority. The visit will lift the silence from their world and, in time, give rise to devotion and defiance that reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways. This is a book about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred, between the old gods and the new.

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Defiance is like marijuana – it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.” Chimamanda Ngozi

 

Books on my TBR

That thing around your neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In “Tomorrow is Too Far,” a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”

We Should all be feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike. Argued in the same observant, witty and clever prose that has made Adichie a bestselling novelist, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman today—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

“Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”Chimamanda Ngozi

About Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author. Her best known novels are Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013).

She was born in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. At nineteen, Chimamanda left for the U.S. to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, then went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. Chimamanda graduated summa cum laude from Eastern in 2001, and then completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

It was during her senior year at Eastern that she started working on her first novel, Purple Hibiscus , which was published in October 2003. Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008.

Have you read any books by Chimamanda Adichie? If you haven’t yet then I do suggest that you get one. Purple Hibiscus was her first book and this is what made me fell in love with her writing.Her books have well developed characters, the descriptions are so vivid that she will take you to the heart of the story. Chimamanda also doesn’t shy away from heavy themes such as racism, feminism, war. She tackles  both sides of humanity in her stories. I guess that is why her books are so compelling. I also love the fact that she writes in a voice that I understand. I don’t know if that makes sense but I can relate to her and her writing. I definitely recommend Chimamanda’s book to everyone looking for well written books or for African Literature.

 

Diversity Spotlight Thursday# October 20th

Diversity Spotlight Thursday is a weekly feature hosted by Aimal at Bookshelves and Paperbacks. Please click on this link to get more details about the feature.

To take part all you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. A diverse book you have read and enjoyed
2. A diverse book that has already been released but you have not read
3. A diverse book that has not yet been released

The books on my list this week have different types of conflict as a main theme. One is set in Sierra Leone and is about a child soldier. The second one is about the Rwanda Genocide. I have also listed an upcoming book about the civil rights movement and lastly, there is a book about slavery.

A Book I Have Read

Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in rural Kenya to a father whose four wives bore him more than a score of children. The man who would become one of Africa’s leading writers was the fifth child of the third wife. Even as World War II affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in particularly unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as very much the apple of his mother’s eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.
 
In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi deftly etches a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people, and their culture; the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war; and the troubled relationship between an emerging Christianized middle class and the rural poor. And he shows how the Mau Mau armed struggle for Kenya’s independence against the British informed not only his own life but also the lives of those closest to him.
 
Dreams in a Time of War speaks to the human right to dream even in the worst of times. It abounds in delicate and powerful subtleties and complexities that are movingly told.

Ngugi is one of my favourite authors. He writes about Kenya like nobody else does. This book is set in pre-colonial Kenya though it extends to the colonial period. What’s more interesting is that I work near the place where Ngugi grew up so the setting of the book is a place that I see quite often. It is interesting to read about how it was in the 1930s and compare it with what it is today.

Happy Mashujaa(Heroes) Day to all my fellow Kenyans. May we never forget all those who fought for our independence!

A Book on my TBR

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christine Lamb

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.

Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.

A  Book that has not yet been released

Get it Together, Delilah by Erin Gough

A story about falling in love, literally.

Seventeen-year-old Delilah Green wouldn’t have chosen to do her last year of school this way, but she figures it’s working fine. Her dad is on a trip to fix his broken heart after her mom left him for another man, so Del’s managing the family café in his absence. Easy, she thinks. But what about:

-homework and the nasty posse of mean girls making her life hell
-or how one of Del’s best friends won’t stop guilt-tripping her
-and her other best friend is so in love with his tutor he might go to jail for her if Del doesn’t do something
But who cares about any of that really, because above all else, she can’t stop thinking about beautiful Rosa who dances every night across the street until one day Rosa comes in the café door . . .

And if Rosa starts thinking about Del, too, then how in the name of caramel milkshakes will Del get the rest of it together?

Publication  Date: 04 Apr 2017

I have never read a book classified as LGBTQIA before. I have just requested this one from NetGalley.

Have you read any of these books? Which other books would you recommend that I add to my TBR. If you participated in this weekly feature, please leave your link in the comments section and I will visit your post.

Diversity Spotlight Thursday# September 29

Diversity Spotlight Thursday is a weekly feature hosted by Aimal at Bookshelves and Paperbacks. Please click on this link to get more details about the feature.

To take part all you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. A diverse book you have read and enjoyed
2. A diverse book that has already been released but you have not read
3. A diverse book that has not yet been released

 

A Book I Have Read

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaleed Hosseini

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul(Afghanistan)—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.

This is one of the best books that I have ever read. I really like Khaleed Hosseini and have read all his books. The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed are both pretty good but A Thousand Splendid Suns is my favorite of the three.

 

A Book on my TBR

The Lovers: Romeo and Juliet in Afghanistan by Rod Norland

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia’s large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family’s honor. They are still in hiding.

I have had this memoir for a while now. I hope to read it sometime soon.

 

 A Book that has not yet been released

Stay with me by Ayobami Adebayo

‘There are things even love can’t do… If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love…’

Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything – arduous pilgrimages, medical consultations, dances with prophets, appeals to God. But when her in-laws insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair.

Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 80s Nigeria, Stay With Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief, and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood. It is a tale about our desperate attempts to save ourselves and those we love from heartbreak.

Hardcover, 304 pages

Expected publication: March 2nd 2017 by Canongate

 I received this book from NetGalley and I can’t wait to read it.I just know that I will like this book!

Exciting News: I wrote about Trevor Noah’s Memoir: Born a Crime on my post last week on Thursday. I didn’t think that I would get the book and it took three weeks before I got feedback.However, I am happy to say that I got approved last night!

Have you read any of these books? Which other books would you recommend that I add to my TBR. If you participated in this weekly feature, please leave your link in the comments section and I will visit your post.

Diversity Spotlight Thursday

Diversity Spotlight Thursday is a weekly feature hosted by Aimal at Bookshelves and Paperbacks . Please click on this link to get more details about the feature.

To take part all you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. A diverse book you have read and enjoyed
2. A diverse book that has already been released but you have not read
3. A diverse book that has not yet been released

This is my first time participating in Diversity Spotlight Thursday.  I have always been interested in books that feature different cultures and help know more about other people so I definitely excited about this meme.

A Book I Have Read

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

Memory is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?

In The Book of Memory, Petina Gappah has created a uniquely slippery narrator: forthright, acerbically funny, and with a complicated relationship to the truth. Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

I read this book recently and enjoyed it immensely. It’s the first book that I have ever read that features an albino main character. It is also the first book that I have read set in Zimbabwe. The book opened my eyes to albinism and also gave some aspects of life in the country for people of different cultures. You can read my review here.

 A Book on my TBR

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery.

One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

I hope to read this book in the next coming week. What intrigued me about this book is the setting. I am yet to read anything set in Ghana even if its only partially set there. The angle of slavery and resettling in America also got my attention.

A Book that has not yet been released

The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa

In 1939 before everything changed, Hannah Rosenthal lived a charmed life. Her family moved in Berlin’s highest social circles, admired by friends and neighbors. But, in an instant, that sunlit world vanished. Now the streets of Berlin are draped with red, white, and black flags; their fine possessions are hauled away, and they are no longer welcome in the places that once felt like home. The two friends make a pact: come what may, they promise to have a future together.

As Hannah and Leo’s families desperately begin to search for a means of escape, a glimmer of hope appears when they discover the Saint Louis, a transatlantic liner that can give Jews safe passage to Cuba. As the passengers gain renewed hope for a bright future ahead, love between Hannah and Leo blossoms. But soon reports from the outside world began to filter in, and dark news overshadows the celebratory atmosphere on the ship; the governments of Cuba, the United States, and Canada are denying the passengers of the St. Louis admittance to their countries, forcing them to return to Europe as it descends into the Second World War. The ship that had seemed their salvation seems likely to become their death sentence.

After four days anchored at bay, only a handful of passengers are allowed to disembark onto Cuban soil, and Hannah and Leo must face the grim reality that they could be torn apart. Their future is unknown, and their only choice will have an impact in generations to come.

This book will be released on October 18, 2016

Have you read any of these books? Which other books would you recommend that I add to my TBR. If you participated in this weekly feature or any featuring diversity, please link me to your post.