ktravula – a travelogue!

Of Books and Used Books

I like books, but only to the extent that they don’t become a physical burden. When I was younger, I used to like the idea of a stacked bookshelf filled with books of different kinds – even when I didn’t get to read them all. My room when I was between fourteen and eighteen was filled with over two hundred books that I’d gathered from all around the house. I studied library archiving methods from books and made a list of all of them, delighting in the ability to monitor their movement whenever anyone borrowed them.

Much of those book were pass-me-downs from father and elder siblings. Father gave me tonnes of Readers’ Digest issues from the 60s and 70s along with series of novels from a writer called Dennis Robins. Sisters read James Hardley Chase and Harold Robins and a few Mills and Boons series. There were also books from the African Pacesetter series that provided an opening into a world of new adventures. The real heavyweight literature texts however were from Shakespeare (father gave me his copy of The Complete Works), Wole Soyinka (we had a copy of The Lion and the Jewel as well as The Jero Plays. I never did figure out who owned them. They could have strayed in somehow from borrowings. I remember vividly when father handed me his copy of Ake, saying, “This is one of his most accessible prose works. Even I can understand it. It turned out to be one of the writer’s most delightful reads.), Chukwuemeka Ike (The Bottled Leopard, The Naked Gods), D. Olu Olagoke’s The Incorruptible Judge, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child, Nkem Nwankwo (Danda and some other one I can’t remember now), Efua T. Sutherland’s Edufa, Chinua Achebe’s trilogies, and his outstanding Chike and the River which I read in primary school. I also remember Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge which I never read because at that time for a silly reason that it was too big a book to be read without accompanying pictures. Along with all of those were the Yoruba texts: all of D.O. Fagunwa’s books including the famous Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, Bamiji Ojo’s Menumo, Adebayo Faleti’s Ogun Awitele, Akinwunmi Isola’s Efunsetan Aniwura (which we read in the Yoruba class in secondary school), father’s own poetry and prose collections, among so many others.

The house was a wonderland of sorts with such very many ideas locked in the pages of creative texts that I delighted not only in reading, but in making mine. I called the home library The Virgo Library and made a catalogue of all borrower. I also made a rubber stamp out of flip-flops and branded all of them with coded numbers all starting with VL. Much of the said library became depleted between 2000 and 2005 of undergraduate studies through lending and book exchanges with friends. In turn, I exchanged them for an introduction into a world of new texts and so called “adult” literature of Rushdie, Joyce, Marquez and the rest of them.

Then there was the other realization that half of the books we should even be reading didn’t even get to Nigeria on time, except occasionally through professors (like Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji) who brought them in truckloads after every return trip. We read voraciously from the many book exchanges with such trusting professors. It was a good thing that books – like the sea – renewed their buoyancy after each use, and the knowledge in them went around. Sometime when I think about it now that I’m in the US with Amazon.com at my fingertips, I wonder how much we missed out of back then because we didn’t have anywhere to buy books, or sometimes even the means to do so. Great books were encountered only in random places either in the shelf of a travelling professor, or in the corner of a used bookstore by the side of the road.

Most of the books on Amazon.com today have used equivalents that cost between $0.01 and $1, excluding shipping. What a delight, especially to find out when they arrive that they actually look as good as new. But what if they didn’t? Who cares? A book is a book is a book. The content will remain the same through pawings, markings, note taking, and dogearings. I’ll read it, leave a few notes in some of the margins, and hand them over to the next reader. These days I don’t keep books with me anymore. I find the concept of a stationary shelf of books to be tiring and not just because of the cost to move them around through airport baggage weight scanners. It might be why the Kindle or the iPad have become the next best companion of the itinerant reader. As clichéd as it might sound, there’s still an allure to the feel of real books, and I won’t tire to buying and reading them. And this, my friends, is why those who take a look at my new Amazon wishlist will find a list of books I’ve wanted to read, along with a few gadgets that have stolen my interest, including the iPad. (Hint: Mr. Jobs, here’s your chance to win me completely over).

What is the value of books, or knowledge, or even Christmas gifts? A delight, I tell you. Or ask a fifteen year old boy discovering the world, discovering himself through the words of others in the dead of night.

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Picture source: http://www.binarydollar.com/category/frugal/, http://stkarnick.com/culture/category/culture101/

Holidays and Readings

This period of the season just after final exams means only one thing: a long space of time left open to do anything under the sun – or on top of the snow, depending on what part of the world you occupy. Holiday means days without school, without classes or volunteer work at the Institute, without work at the Foreign Language Lab, without driving (much) and without Blackboard postings. I need that. I looked into my book drawer yesterday and found almost two dozen books I’d bought without reading more than a few pages.

Just yesterday, two more arrived: Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and Wole Soyinka’s Art, Dialogue and Outrage. The latter was a text that had dominated much of the many conversations and debates with mates and scholar as an undergraduate in Ibadan. Obviously important to understanding the thoughts of Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, the book has always been a reference point. Spending a few minutes on the preface has however convinced me that I should read it only when I’m well fed, and in a most patient mood for deliberately difficult writing. Feynman’s collection of essays is a delight, like many of his earlier publications. Much of the book are transcribed from his BBC interviews as well as from many of his published essays and speeches. Another one of his books What Do You Care What Other People Think now lay somewhere in my bag. I can’t wait to devour them.

The other crazy idea in my head, encouraged – no less – by Mohamed is that we get in the car and drive to California during the winter break. If I wasn’t considering it myself, I would have said that he had gone nuts. Now I’ve given my (almost) word and may have to do it after all. The only obstacle is a stretch of road 2000 miles long which may most likely include black ice and heaps of snow many miles long. What do you think? Is it worth it or would a good old flying do? Oh, there’s still the TSA scanners and grope-downs to worry about.

Visiting Missouri Again

I drove to Missouri again today, the second time I’m doing so in the last one year. The state border is only twenty minutes away from my location. This time however, unlike the last time where I had to take a sick friend to the Barnes Jewish hospital, I was visiting in order to perfect my driving and adjustment to American road and rule system. For that, I had to drive almost around the state making sure that I tested myself on each type of road and driving conditions. Traveling with a University professor, mentor on and off the wheels, the trip took much of the whole day, going through a few major towns in the state. Missouri is famous not just for the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the Mississippi river but a whole lot of historical hotspots including Mark Twain’s famous residence, the site of the brutal fighting of the American civil war, the famous Route 66 among many others.

One of the places visited today was the Missouri Welcome Centre, a one-stop shop for every tourist destination in the state. Then I visited the city of Manchester where we’d gone to check up a few books at the Borders Bookstore. Borders is one of America’s largest bookstores. The only Nigerian books there were two new reprints of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, a different cover edition of Purple Hibiscus and another one of Half of a Yellow Sun. There was no Soyinka or any of the other contemporary names in Nigerian fiction. Well, I also found Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, which is only proper since Oprah Winfrey had chosen it once as a Book Club Selection. There were a whole tonne of book on the other aisles though, and I had a good time browsing through a few of them

I was a Clayton, and a few other neighbourhoods in the city. Many of the pubs were closed for Labour Day. A few of them were still open, with considerable patronage. My own assessment of the driving exercise was that I’m now ready to take on the country. The downside is having to be in total control of a moving vehicle on such a busy highway as those around the midwest. Worse than Lagos in a few different ways, and better in a lot more, the main minus to driving is only the letting go of the ability to daydream for a few hours every day.

First Words

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, flatly baffled in the sun.”

– Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small things (1997)

“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I’ve alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.”

– Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the suun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”

– Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937)

“The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.”

– J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man ((2005)

Saturday: Bookjam at Silverbird

I attended the Bookjam at Silverbird event yesterday for the first time since it started. This was the sixth edition. In attendance was American based Nigerian author Unoma Azuah, author of Sky High Flames, Madeleine Thien author of Certainty, Helon Habila, Caine Prize-winning author of Measuring Time, and Tsitsi Dangarembga author of Nervous Conditions.

Here are some of the shots from there. The programme afforded me time to catch up with old friends and meet new ones too. Certainly a refreshing time.

Bookjam is an event that takes place at the Silverbird Lifestyle Bookstore every last Saturday of every month.

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