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Search tags: Chimamanda-Adichie
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url 2018-01-24 15:42
Best Nonfiction Books of 2017 (per overdrive for library ebooks)
Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science - Peter Watson
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - Richard Rothstein
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women - Kate Moore
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett
Rescuing Penny Jane: One Shelter Volunteer, Countless Dogs, and the Quest to Find Them All Homes - Amy Sutherland
Dying: A Memoir - Cory Taylor
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation - Randall Fuller
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

I just linked a few, no particular order or topic.  See the link for full list.  Lots of political ones.  And book pages have more suggested reads on them ... I think I will be going down the rabbithole of my library wishlists ...

Source: lfpl.overdrive.com/collection/109107
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review 2017-02-06 14:40
The Thing Around Your Neck
The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This was an amazing collection, each story focusing on a different part of life, each one entirely different from the last, and each one completely amazing.

There are a lot of reasons why these stories were each amazing and beautiful. For starters, they are #ownvoices, which in itself lends depth to them that is hard to come by from people not familiar with others experiences, but the stories are also varied in many other ways.

I remember first hearing about Adichie from her TEDtalk, the Danger of a Single Story, so I knew not to expect the stories to be similar to each other or to any idea that I had about Africa or African people. Each one is a different part of life for African people. I know that several stories were about Nigerians specifically, but not whether all were. I know Adichie is Nigerian (yes, I even looked up her Wikipedia page to double check), but I don't want to make either assumption that it means all her characters must be Nigerian nor that the experience of people from different countries within Africa are interchangeable. Instead, I'll just point out that I don't know. I do know that one story pointed out where secondary characters were from and the protagonist even refers to them by their country more than their name as they are all new to her.

Getting back to the way the stories were varied, some were immigration stories to the US and others took place in Africa, but even one of those could be loosely categorized as an immigration story because it is about a woman attempting to obtain refugee status to go to the US. It would be difficult to judge the stories against each other on a level of enjoyable as not all are happy or sad, but they all make the reader think about their ideas of how they treat people and how they are treated by people.

I was glad that I listened to the audiobook, read by Adjoa Andoh, because of the character names. Not only would I have mispronounced, but I would have missed out on the lyrical beauty of many of them. The many accents required to read through all the stories were masterfully done as one should expect from an actress of Andoh's accomplishments.

Altogether, it's an enlightening set of stories that should definitely be read by anyone interested in stories about the lives of women. This does not mean that it should be relegated to "chick lit", though. None of the stories are delivered in the "humorously and lightedhardly" style of what is often referred to as chick lit. These are serious stories about women's lives, the struggles, the many forms that heartbreak takes, the difficult decisions that must be contended with. While I wouldn't use the book alone to indicate what African or Nigerian culture is completely about (then we'd fall into the narrow view that Adichie herself cautions against), I would say that it paints an interesting picture of what it is like for some women.

So again, an excellent pick for anyone interested in women's stories, particularly those looking to expand their reading to include stories in more than one country, of moving between countries, of the way lives mix between people of different cultures in several ways. The collection on its own, it still expands the idea of what African stories are and takes us a beyond a single story.

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url 2015-09-22 13:39
lolantaczyta.wordpress.com/2015/09/22/americanah-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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url 2014-03-20 17:55
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Takes The National Book Critics Circle Prize
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url 2013-12-05 15:29
New York Times: Top Ten Books of 2013
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner
Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
Tenth of December - George Saunders
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital - Sheri Fink
After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead - Alan S. Blinder
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House - Peter Baker
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 - Christopher Clark
Wave - Sonali Deraniyagala

How is Far From the Tree not on this list? I just don't understand. 

 

Also baffled by the love for Americanah and The Flamethrowers

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