2022 : What I am reading this year.

Disclaimer : I am starting to write this post on 26th February 2022 and I will hopefully finish it in 31st December 2022. 

I tend to think I am a voracious reader. At times I tend to think I am addicted to long flowing words forming sentences that make sense which you can decipher meaning from. I have read more books in my life than I can remember and at any point of time, I have two books am reading concurrently on completely different topics. This has proven to anchor me in sanity especially when everything around me is not making sense. The years of compounding knowledge have enabled me to be able to understand different and assimilate to different environments without having a precedential experience with them.

It on this line of thought that I decided to come up with this post. I rarely track what I have read once I am done but I had a review and thought it would be a great thing if I would be documenting what I read and a short synopsis (through my own words) of how the book was.

I would be doing this on a monthly basis and once I am done I think this will be one of the longest post I have ever done. Here is my anticipated books of 2022

January

1. Steal Like an Artist – Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon is a creative writer in his own way and through this book we get to understand how the greatest artists in the world at the peak of their times were more good at learning their predecessors than coming up with something original.

The phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” makes a lot of sense.

Creating is 80% referencing and researching and 20% putting this together and as a perfectionist who sometimes tends to spend so much time on one thing, it was an insight on how I could restructure  how I do what I do.

2. Nearly all the Men in Lagos are Mad – Damilare Kuku

One word for this book : hilarious.

I rarely read up fiction but I came across a snippet of Damilare’s Nearly all the Men in Lagos are Mad on a WhatsApp Status and less than 2 hours later I was already a chapter in into the book. It took me two days to read this book.  This short collection is both witty and brought on from women’s perspectives about being in relationships.

The setting is Lagos, the stories narrated from a first person perspective. You will find yourself laughing through all the twelve stories.

February

I recently relocated to Rwanda for some months to set up a business I am part of Lifesten Health and having studied its history in school back in Kenya, I set about trying to really understand the real story of what led to the culmination of the genocide in 1994.

Rwanda is a country rich with history and unlike most African countries, it has felt the impact of neocolonialism far much greater.

I took a trip to the Kigali Public Library to get some books touching on the above and was able to get the following sets

1. Season of Blood : A Rwandan Journey – Fergal Keane

Fergal Keane is a Foreign Correspondent working with the BBC and in 1994 he was based in South Africa covering the transition from apartheid. He travelled to Rwanda at the height of the genocide covering the country on both warring fronts; the government forces and militia against the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and through his experience we see the impact of war on innocent citizens who are forced to choose sides.

Through his book, I now fully understood the Rwandan history and how the segregation that started 76 years before at the Treaty of Versailles fostered so much hate leading to more than a tenth of the population being wiped out.

Fergal conducts one on one interviews with both people who gave directives and the executioners and we can clearly see the economic class disparity between the two groups and how this led to the large toll in numbers of casualties.

From visiting mass killing zones to unitarian areas, this book gives you a front seat of what really happened then

2. The Shadow of Imana – Veronique Tadjo

Veronique Tadjo covers Rwanda in 1998, 4 years after the genocide. She visits the different areas that were killing zones but have now been turned into memorial sites.

Kwibuka.

The only way to remember all those who lost their lives is to commemorate them in ways that their memory lives on forever.

Through her engagements with people who lost loved ones during 1994, you realize the impact on the people was not only during the 100 days that the events occurred.

We can see through her eyes, the country is slowly getting back to her feet and her future, once a dim on the horizon, now has a glimmer of hope.