13. The Young Inferno by John Agard and Satoshi Kitamura is a verse retelling of Dante's Inferno embedded in a picture book. I liked Kitamura's stark, black and white, art style but in the art-as-storytelling stakes it seemed to me to lack variety. It also clashed with one of the text's spelled out messages: "My teacher said, 'You've got a point. ( Read more... )

4. I read Chinua Achebe's Collected Poems. I felt as if I'm not the intended audience for the majority of these poems. I'm not "African"/Nigerian/Igbo. Only a handful of the poems, mostly early "Biafra" poems, seemed aimed at me and my level of understanding. Instead I felt the great privilege of being invited into someone else's conversation as a ( Read more... )

I Do Not Come to You By Chance narrates the first-person story of Kingsley Ibe, an unemployed chemical engineer who is the opara, or first-born son, of his Igbo family. As such, he must steer them through the difficulties of an economically and political unstable Nigeria.

I read this book in large part because I have been devouring the books of ( Read more... )