ImageNations

December in Review: Before I proceed to review the year in books, let me first review the month of December. By the way, Happy New Year to you all. Bonne Année . To complete the challenge of reading 60 books,  I projected to read four books in December . However, I exceeded this target by three books which was expected since the average for the last two months - October and November - had been 8 books. In all I read a total of 1,573 pages, which gives an average of 51 pages a day. There was a dip in December if compared to the last two months but it was not a bad month for reading. I read my first science fiction of the year; my second ever Graphic 'Novel'; and my first ever Zambian novel. I also read three short story anthologies, including Delta of Venus - that famous book. The following were the books read: Delta of Venus by Anais Nin . This is a collection of short stories bothering on different sexual desires, cravings, perversions and more. It is both repulsive...

Initially, I appended this to the Year in Review post; however, upon further thought I've decided to make it a whole post on its own. It made the other post too long and detracted from it. I have already shared what some friends of mine think were their favourite books of 2012 . This year saw me read some famous books like  Great Gatsby ,  Bluest Ey es ,  July's People ,  A Farewell to Arms ,  and many others. My favourite reads of 2012 are: Non-African Books The Book Thief   by   Mark Zusak .  Mark Zusak in this book brings out how infernal the human mind could be and the frailty of friendship. The book's protagonist was Death and how he empathised with humanity has he was forced to pick destroyed souls from one suburb to the other. The book was also written from the point-of-view of a young girl, Liesel Meminger. Bluest Eye  by  Toni Morrison . This book shows the psychological effects of slavery and segregation in America a...

Last year I shared my friends' favourite books of 2011 . Favourite books were collected from friends on Twitter, Facebook, and the Google Plus platforms. The objective is to encourage people to read more books and for other readers to know that there's a community of readers out there. It also serve as a pool for other readers to select books they would want to read. I've already shared ImageNations' favourite books of 2012 . Here are the favourite books of friends:   Nartekuor  is a twitter friend. She's from Ghana and considers herself as 'doing the most outrageous things and chalking it up to life's topsy turvies'. Nartekuor chose John Grisham's  The Appeal ; Ms. Komassi  describes herself as a '"work in progress", a friend, law graduate, blawgger, writer, God's girl, vintage fan...'. She blogs here . Ms. Komassi's favourite books include The Suns of Independence ; Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals ; and Alla...

Source After sharing my Favourite Reads of 2011 I turned to my friends to share theirs with ImageNations through the Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus platforms. The handler on Twitter was #FavBook2011. There were no rules except that the book(s) should have been read in 2011. The following were the books shared. The objective of this sharing exercise is to encourage others to read.  The first person to respond to this call was  Novisi Dzitre who blogs at  Novisi . He is a Blogger, Technology Geek (though he might not accept this), Writer, a Friend and a Great Controversialist.  Novisi chose Ngugi wa Thiong'o's  Weep not Child  and A Grain of Wheat   as his favourite books of 2011. It is not every time that an author gets to enjoy this position in a reader's life. If you haven't tried anything yet by Ngugi, you should start from the first of these books. Obed Sarpong of Ready to Chew , a Radio Broadcast Journalist and Writer, sel...

Source: Penguin The year 2011 saw me read more more than twice the total number of books and single stories I read in 2010 (the actual review of the year's activities will be published on this blog somewhere on 31st December or early January, 2012). This post presents some of my favourite books read in 2011 and not necessarily books published in 2011. I usually don't get that kind of luxury embedded in reading books just as they are published.  Reading a large number of books presents one major problem: choosing the favourite ones. To avoid this problem I decided to settle on six for each of the two categories: African-authored books and Non-African-authored books. No further classification such as fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others were considered as not enough books were read in some of these and would endanger this exercise. African-authored Books: This blog is mostly about promoting African Literature. African Literature here is defined as any literary ...