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2024 Reading Wrap up & Reflection

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Twenty twenty four was a wild ride of a year for me. I started off the year with a desire to re-launch my YouTube channel and a fire inside me to experience great books. All these lofty plans were of course put to rest when on the last Saturday in February I found out I was pregnant and was hit with a tsunami of hormones soon after. My desire and capacity for anything book related went out the window as I channeled what little energy I had towards my day job and trying very hard not to vomit every minute of every day.

The wonderful thing about being pregnant though, other than the fact that I have the most perfect little boy on earth, was that my reading had to be focused as I could only read books that I was genuinely interested in. So when my reading finally resumed in July every book that did not relate to pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding felt like a breath of fresh air.

With that being said however there were some recurring themes and some standout books. The biggest theme me was “motherhood” , somehow even the books I didn’t think would have anything to do with motherhood touched on it as a topic one way or another. I’ve decided that these were subconscious choices I was making and somehow reading about parenting even when I didn’t intend to because you can never be too prepared!

Now that I’ve beat about the bush appropriately let’s get into my top 5 books for 2024:

Book 5: Minor Detail by Adana Shibli

In this book we are split between two timelines set in Palestine with two women. One woman who is subjected to a traumatic death and another woman many years later who seeks to investigate the death.

This is the sort of book that stays with you. We follow two events that are in two different time periods in Palestine.

I appreciated the writers ability to pack so much story into such a short book. It’s very rare that a book can be neither character or plot driven and still manage to make me as a reader heavily invested in the story.

Book 4: Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Witty and precise, this book is an unraveling of a mother and daughter relationship. Annie John was my second Jamaica Kincaid book and we follow a young girl, Annie John, as she goes from being the apple of her mothers eye to something on the opposite of the spectrum as expectations of what it is to be a “young woman” start to become the focal point of their relationship.

I appreciated Kincaid’s ability to give you a character that is so young yet is able to feel the full magnitude of love and loss when that love is lost.

Book 3: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

A fantastically told family saga detailing the fall of a great family built on shaky ground. We meet a few characters in this book including; a teenage daughter on cusp of beginning her adulthood and a young son who is lonely amidst a family of people all dealing with their own failings.

I really appreciated that the characters in this book were all fully fleshed out and each of their stories felt real, as though if you were had pulled up a chair and were listening to someone tell you their life story.

Book 2: Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah

A love story following the lives of a Ghanaian-British couple who veer into parenthood despite one of them being uninterested in parenthood. We follow the challenges that occur between two people who love each other, with opposing views on parenthood and their families.

I loved the writers crafting of characters and storyline. At every point I felt truly engaged in what would happen next and found myself rooting for this young couple despite finding myself on opposite sides of each of them.

Book 1: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

This book is a book on love between mother and child. It details the many challenges this mother faces in mothering her very young son (a toddler), the friction this causes between her and her husband and the depth of her love for her son.

I loved the writing his book. I think it perfectly captures what it is to be a mother in love. There are so many challenges and moments of self doubt in this book but in all of it there is a thick layer that is the love a mother has for her child.

Those are all the books I’ve loved this year. On my YouTube channel Best Books of 2024 I discuss two other books which make my top seven but not my top five reads. Overall I think my enjoyment of books was very much coloured by the phase in life I am in. Ig would be interesting to me whether by top five books would strike the same chord with me if I were to read them in the future.

All in all good reading year all things considered.

I’m looking forward to more great reads in 2025 and wishing you the same.

Book Reviews, books, fiction, goodreads, interesting reads, lifestyle

BOOK REVIEW: SULA BY Toni Morrison

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“Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear.”

The question of freedom has always been an interesting one for me. Maybe it’s because I come from a country where Freedom only became a reality for people like me 27 years ago. Or maybe it’s because even with that I realised that being a woman and African meant that freedom might just be an elusive concept for me. However, even with that understanding, I have always been wildly interested in the notion of freedom and complete autonomy over myself. I have spent many nights and many days ruminating over what it means to be free and how it that freedom manifests in various places in our lives. Sula by Toni Morrison is a book that explores this very concept of freedom and how it intersects at a crossroads of Blackness and Womanhood. 

Sula was first published in 1973 and is Toni Morrison’s second published novel. Anyone who has read Toni Morrison will tell you that she does not write for half-hearted readers. She writes for people who are willing to get down in the trenches with her. People who are willing to ask the writer questions and aren’t scared to have those same questions pointed right back at them. That is the beauty of Toni Morrison, she requires your full attention before, during and after you read her work. 

“Because each of them had discovered yers before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden for them, they had set about creating something else to be.”

In Sula we follow the life of a woman who Toni Morrison referred to as “whimsical and who follows her own instincts”. We meet Sula and her best friend Nel as they grow up, find each other and create a home for one another within each other.  We follow their lives and the lives’ of the women who shape them. We read along as Sula and Nel become too different in their views and in their womanhood. Nel lives a life that is seen as typical by many standards; married with children and living in her hometown. Sula follows a path of independence going off to college only to return to her little town completely belonging to herself.  

Toni Morrison does such a great job at exploring the different manifestations of what it means to be free, Black and a woman in the United States from the 1920s  to the 1960s. We experience freedom through the Peace women who are not bound to anyone other than each other which is in itself is another type of confinement. Our understanding of freedom is further stretched when Sula dismisses familial obligations by severing ties with her own family but also by bringing into question the foundations of Nel’s family and the families of other women in the small town of Medallion. We see people act a certain way in her presence. In Sula, Toni Morrison really does the work of expanding the readers understanding of community; how our communities label us and how we then live out our lives as a result of that labelling. I found myself questioning the very notion and function of community, can any of us live out our freewill if we are really set in places that expect us to tick certain boxes in order to earn being a part of something and of belonging to some people. Sula is a great book for questioning and I enjoyed the pacing of the book. It seemed to pause just when I need a break and throw me back into the story when I was ready to dive back in.

“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A second handed lonely.”

One of the things I love about Toni Morrison’s work is that she does not write good and bad characters. I don’t think it is ever clear when leaving her work who is the good, the bad nor the ugly. You walk away with questions. Questions about what you see as good and questions about the lenses that you have been provided with that allow you to see certain things as bad and only attributable to bad people. I enjoyed this tone in Sula. I enjoyed the curiosity I held throughout the book about whose side I was supposed to be on and in the end I came to the realisation that the imperfect characters were by design. That not knowing is intentional because it is mirror of life, of the unknowingness of whether you are good or bad and then falling to an understanding that you are neither. 

Sula is definitely a book for the ages that will need to be read over and over to fully uncover the messages in the book. There are some things that I am still unsure about but I am one hundred percent sure that it will be a book that I read over and over again. If you haven’t read it I would highly recommend that you pick it up. 

Book Reviews, books, creativity, goodreads, interesting reads, non-fiction

BOOK REVIEW: Know My Name

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“If my name came out, what would they even say? Chanel who works a nine-to-five entry-level job , had never been to London.”  

*Deep inhale, deep exhale* this book should be required reading. If not this book then at the very least Chanel Miller’s victim statement should be required reading. This is an important book. 

I don’t think that even now, as I type, I have figured out a way to review this book in a way that will do it justice. This book has joined the ranks as one of my favourite non-fiction reads of all time. This book felt important. I’ll be honest and say I put it off for some time because I simply wasn’t ready and while reading it I realised that my readiness had to be secondary for all the Emily Doe’s in the world, my readiness would have to take the back seat. 

I knew a few things goings into Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. I knew that in 2015 there was a Stanford rape case that somehow made its way to me, all the way in Johannesburg even though I had never been to Stanford. I knew that the most important thing that the media felt I needed to know about the case was that the accused was a really, really good swimmer. And finally, I knew that Chanel Miller was previously known as Emily Doe and that she had written a book about the events of that one night in January 2015 and the events that followed. 

I knew nothing about Chanel. I didn’t know whether she liked drawing, whether she liked cooking, whether her own future had been promising and whether or not she could even swim. Despite this, I came to this book incredibly aware that I knew a lot of Chanel’s, I also knew that I have been almost been a Chanel multiple times (I have also had some Swedes in my life) and I also knew that I needed to read this book for all those other soon-to-be Chanel’s. 

In reviewing this book I have considered simply taking pictures of the words in the book, putting them here and saying “yeah, what she said” and walking away but I am not going to do that, this book deserves a lot more than that. 

“What the fuck are you doing? She’s unconscious.

Do you think this is okay?

What are you smiling about?

Say sorry to her.”

Know My Name starts off with the author recalling everything that happened that evening before she went out. As I was reading the book I realised how detailed Chanel Miller told the stories about that night and how after that one moment of her memory loss she seemed to remember everything else with so much precision and clarity, then it dawned on me that the reason Chanel Miller could remember everything after that morning so well was because once her name changed from who she was to Emily Doe and to victim, she had no other choice but to be very specific and clear about everything else. She was victim now and victims don’t have the luxury of misremembering or of not knowing exactly what colour shoes they were wore and what food they had and how it tasted as it hit the tongue. Victims are held to an impossible high standard of being the custodians of everyones memory. Something small that no one else would have to remember victims are not only expected to remember that but to also remember everyone else’s reaction to the thing that happened. 

“I wanted to trim all the fat, all these distractions, to show you the meat of the story.”

I don’t think I have a lot to say about this book because it quite literally took my breath away and I am so glad that it is out there in the world because this story not only deserved to be told but because Chanel Miller is an incredibly gifted writer. Know My Name is a story about becoming a victim and also about staying who you are and waking up to the realisation that this new title, that the world insists on only knowing you by, is less than even a fraction of who you are. 

“In each line I found common, common, a part of , everybody, everybody. This pattern was not an accident. He was leading Brock back into the herd, where he would blend into the comfort of community. Compare this to when he had questioned me: You did a lot of partying. You’ve had blackouts before. It was you and you, the lens fixed so close I was stripped of surrounding. For Brock, his goal was to integrate, for me it was to isolate.”

If you read this book you will be aware of the hyper vigilance that all women across the world are conditioned into. You will learn that a lot of the world believes that abusers are following the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing and that the victims are being divergent and somehow landing themselves in trouble. You will cry with the Miller family and every other family that has had to go through what they went through. You will also be slightly more hopeful about the kindness of strangers and everyday heroes who lift others up simply by doing what’s right. You will also walk away knowing somethings about Chanel, like that she loves her younger sister fiercely, that she loves to draw and that she has no issues with not fitting the mould of what a victim and survivor of sexual assault is. 

Read this book. Whoever you are, if you haven’t yet, read this book. I think that is all I can say about this book, I could probably say more but the message of “read this book” deserves to not be surrounded by clutter, so I will leave it here and ask you once again to read this book. 

“My writing is sophisticated because I had a head start, because I am years in the making, because  I am my mother and her mother before. When I write, I have the privilege of using a language that she fought her whole life to understand. When I speak in opposition, I am grateful my voice is uncensored. I do not take my freedom of speech, my abundance of books, my access to education, my ease of first language for granted. My mom is a writer. The difference is, she spent the first twenty years of her life surviving. I am a writer, who spent twenty years of my life fed and loved in a home and classroom.”