February in Review and Projections for March

February was also a good reading month. Despite the fact that it is two days short of January, the reading rate was not affected. I enjoyed almost every book I read in this month and I fulfilled all the books I projected to read.

Like January, I read a total number of 7 books and 4 single stories (uncollected short stories), 2 less than in January. However, the total number of pages read was 1795 compared with 1787 in January; this makes it a rate of 61.90 pages per day in February compared to 57.65 in January. I do these things for fun and my excel sheet does the estimation based on the formulas I have provided. It's just fun but I try not to make the stats take over the fun in reading. 

The following books are the books read:
  1. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (for the African Reading Challenge, Top 100 Books Reading Challenge and Chunkster Challenge)
  2. Sula by Toni Morrison
  3. Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham (for the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge)
  4. Harare North by Brian Chikwava
  5. Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter
  6. Blindness by Jose Saramago
  7. Maru by Bessie Head
The single stories read as part of the 100 Shots of Shorts Challenge and reviewed for the Short Story Monday are:
  1. Lenny Hearts Eunice by Gary Shteyngart
  2. Dayward by ZZ Packer
  3. The Kid by Salvatore Scibona
  4. Twins C. E. Morgan
I promised to go shopping for African books but I have not and I don't think I can make it within this month or the next. Consequently, I will be running down on my African books, making do with the few I have still not read, which means that my reading this month will be skewed towards non-African books, somewhat. I am not abandoning ImageNations' vision though.

In March, I will be reading the 2010 Caine Prize anthology  A Life in Full and Other Stories for the Short Story Monday series. This anthology is made up of two parts: the first part is the Caine Prize 2010 Shortlisted stories, which I read last year as single stories and the second part is The CDC Caine Prize African Writers' Workshop Stories 2010. The first part would be excluded. I also intend to read Zadie Smith's White teeth for the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge and the Chunkster Reading Challenge. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is also on the shelf. I will read this to complete the trilogy of dystopias which began with 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. For the African Books I have Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns, which will also serve as the Commonwealth Writers Prize Winners Reading Challenge.

I hope March will be as successful as February.

Comments

  1. Buried In Print2 March 2012 at 17:33

    I just happened upon that short story collection in the library a couple of weeks ago (when I had first looked for it they didn't even have it in the collection); I'll be interested to read your thoughts on the stories! Maybe I'll have to make a trip back to that branch sooner than I planned!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ImageNations2 March 2012 at 17:36

      I will serialise it beginning from Monday. I will also love to read your views on the short stories.

      Delete
  2. Geosi3 March 2012 at 17:36

    All best in March, Nana.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Amy6 March 2012 at 19:49

    You read some fantastic books in February, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on more of them. All the best in March too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ImageNations7 March 2012 at 13:07

      Yes. I'm glad people for people like you who make such books available to me. Blindness and Sula were gifts by different people.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Help Improve the Blog with a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10. Unexpected Joy at Dawn: My Reading

Image
Title: Unexpected Joy At Dawn Author: Alex Agyei-Agyiri Genre: Novel Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers Pages: 331 Year: 2004 Country: Ghana Unexpected Joy at Dawn is a story of two siblings, Nii and Mama Orojo, during the 1983 deportation of Ghanaians from Nigeria under the Shehu Shagari government. Nii, who is a Nigerian by blood but a Ghanaian by birth, was left in Ghana by his parents as they made the tortuous journey to Nigeria when Ghana enacted the Aliens Compliance Order of 1969, which made every person living in Ghana without the required papers an alien. His name was changed to reflect the name of his adopted parents. After fourteen years of living in hardship in Ghana, which involves living in slums even though he was an Assistant Manager at a bank, taking on multiple jobs, not being able to bury a wife and being chased around by market women for purported 'fraud', he decided to go to Nigeria in search of his roots. Besides, he entertained the fears of being
Read more

69. The Clothes of Nakedness by Benjamin Kwakye, A Review

Image
Title: The Clothes of Nakedness Author: Benjamin Kwakye Publishers: Heinemann African Writers Series Genre: Fiction/Novel/Class Pages: 212 Year of First Publication: 1998 Country: Ghana For the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa Region Winners Reading Challenge Benjamin Kwakye 's novel The Clothes of Nakedness  is a compelling narrative directed at a Ghanaian audience, in particular. It reveals the economic hardships existing in our society; it also reveals the intricately woven relationships between the rich and the poor and how the 'seemingly' rich manipulate the poor to further that wealth-dom in this dual economic society where absolute riches exist side by side with abject poverty. The latter scenario is even more stark and pathetic if one knows that Nima and Kanda Estates, two neighbourhoods presented in the story, are real and not just fictional representation made concrete by Kwakye's brilliant mind. The story revolves around thr
Read more

42. The Blinkards by Kobina Sekyi

Image
Title: The Blinkards, A Comedy and The Anglo-Fanti - A Short Story Author: Kobina Sekyi Genre: Play/Short Story Pages: 256 Publishers: Heinemann/Readwide ISBN: 978-0-435-92784-4 Year of Publication: 1974 (this edition, 1997) Country: Gold Coast (Now Ghana) Setting:  This book contains two stories: The Blinkards - a play and The Anglo-Fanti - a short story . Though the stories are from two different genres, one theme threads through them: the effect of absolute cultural osmosis or better still the consequences of swallowing an alien culture without much scrutiny, as happened in occupied countries popularly referred to by the occupiers as colonies (colonies of what? Ants? Bees?) Both stories took place in Cape Coast and the setting is very significant to the story. Apart from the author being a Fanti from Cape Coast, Cape Coast was the first point of introduction to colonial rule. As a seaport city, it was the first town that was brought under colonial rule; hence ther
Read more