For some unclear reasons (basically laziness and procrastination), I have not filled an entry here in a long one. I have not stopped adding to the library but I have just stopped updating these pages. I just found this photo in the gallery of my phone and decided to use it here before deleting it. This was taken about two months ago after I unpacked the parcel from the delivery man.
New Year Resolution (1)
Weeks back, I had to rearrange my bookshelf and add a couple of annexes to the existing shelves. Seeing the number of books that needed to be shelved, my daughter compelled me to make a commitment to not buy any new book in 2020.
Noir related
I recently finished reading Lagos Noir and in the middle of it, I decided to look up the history of the Noir series. With over 90 titles all named after different cities of the world, I was keen to see which other titles would attract my attention. I wanted to choose the London one but the stories seemed set in the London of the 70s. I wanted something more recent from a city I was familiar with. I finally settled for Sydney Noir. It is nowhere near my favourite city as I do not have particularly fond memories but the reviews seemed very good, so I went for this.
Late Deprature
There are fewer things that give me joy than attending jazz gigs at night away from home while also lazying in hotel rooms all day and popping into bookshops to pick up random books when I manage to get out of the hotel room. Away in Johanessburg, I had one of such weeks while attending the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival.
Distant Postcodes
I recently tweeted about a stash of books which I had ordered and used an overseas address. These orders were placed over a couple of weeks and had been gathering dust for months. A colleague was in the said city and brought it back home. I was elated, to say the least.
Athens leftover and a boarding lounge
A while back I mentioned my search for Greek contemporary fiction during a recent stay in Athens. I did not give up on my search afterwards. I finally found one of the books I was searching for initially. I found The Scapegoat on Amazon and gladly grabbed the solitary copy that was available.
Sophiatown on my mind
In recent times, I have developed an interest in the history of the Group Area Acts that were instruments of the Apartheid government in South Africa. This recent interest was rekindled by the book Buckingham Palace, District Six which I read earlier this year. It is difficult to rank the heinousness of the instruments deployed by the apartheid government for their evil but the Group Area Acts must be at the top of any list.
Syntagma Square
While preparing for a recent visit to Greece, it occurred to me that I had not immersed myself in the Greek Literary scene despite repeated visits to that beautiful land.
So Good I Bought it Twice
In my view, our love for particular books is rarely objective. Our affinity to certain books like songs is usually subject to the emotions they evoke. These emotions could be merely based on our familiarity or close ties with the content or location of the work. There are few works of fiction set in Port Harcourt city.
Dementia and other unrelated things
A few weeks ago I was listening to the Spectator Book podcast (now and then I find an episode that interests me, other times, I delete after two minutes), the episode with Nicci Gerrard and she was talking about her new book- What Dementia Teaches Us About Love.