I rolled my eyes, and my first thought was : Alaye, let’ s be serious, please. I read an essay that railed against Nigeria’s bourgeoise class and suggested increased taxation and some textbook statist/socialist policies for Nigeria. What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with? So many gems there express my current ethos - there is a time for everything the race is not to the swift waha la n o d ey finish eat, drink, and enjoy good i n labo ur everything is vanity anyway and respect and obey God. If your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment?
And there were the Marvel and DC comics shared between classmates in school. My parents didn’t buy them for me, but some newspapers had daily comic strips (‘ Garth ’ in The Daily Times, ‘ Terror Muda ’ and ‘ Kaptain Afrika ’ in The Vanguard). My mother had a volume on Achebe, abridged versions of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and an intriguing biography of Oscar Wilde. From my father’s library, I remember browsing through volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, abridged versions of the Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Qur’an (which at the time, was a fascinating book for a Seventh Day Adventist to own). My parents also had interesting personal libraries. My favourites included Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night and other Stories, and Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda. As I grew older, my mother added books from the Pacesetters series (thank you and Rest in Peace, Victor Thorpe) and the African Writers Series. It had some Enid Blyton and classics such as Chike and the River The Passport of Mallam Ilia children’s versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo. So, they gradually bought and built me a library. Although my parents were civil servants who didn’t have much, we were rich in books. What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
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