Books-&-Reading

And the Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini The Sound of Things Falling - Juan Gabriel Vasquez Fine Boys - Eghosa Imasuen The One: A Realistic Guide to Choosing Your Soul Mate - Ben Young & Sam Adams Jesus, My Father, The CIA and Me: A Memoir of sorts - Ian Morgan Cron Networking for people who hate networking - Devora Zack. The Practice of the Presence of God - Brother Lawrence Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that can’t stop talking - Susan Cain The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

From my current read, Ben Young and Dr Sam Adams’ book - The One: A Realistic Guide to Choosing Your Soul Mate. Is there chemistry? Are you sexually/ physically attracted to your partner? Is your relationship natural? Do things flow naturally or are you spending a lot more time resolving issues than demonstrating a natural fit? Would this be a good friend? If the chemistry was removed, is it someone you’d want to be with, whose company you enjoy? Can you accept his or her personality as is? Could you spend the rest of your life with the person as they are? Would you want your kids to be like him or her? Could you envision a future in which your children turn out like him or her? Oh and to pass the test, it must be ‘Yes’, 100%…

From the 52 Small Changes book: Sleep is the best meditation - Dalai Lama Last week’s small change went fairly well - bar the odd day on which one coffee just didn’t sort me out. By the end of the week, I was reaching instinctively for my 600ml bottle of water to kick start my day, before anything else. The slightly harder challenge was staying off the cokes, which I did for the most part except for two days - along with a green leaf salad for Wednesday for lunch and on Friday afternoon during my monthly catch up with O. at Nandos. All told there has been noticeable improvement in the quantity of water (and green tea) I drink, which can’t be such a bad thing. ...

From the 52 Small Changes Book: Water is the driving force of nature - Leonardo Da Vinci Or as Fela once famously sang, water no get enemy. Up until a month ago, Cokes were my default drink, in all its forms - diet, regular, zero and a few non conventional forms too [mixed with all sorts of other liquids], which is why this first small chnage will need some serious getting used to. ...

Sir Farouk does a far more eloquent job than I have ever managed of explaining what we’ve been trying to do for the past six weeks with #the3six5NG project - creating a crowd sourced diary of Nigerian perspectives from 365 people for 365 days. Inspired by the Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman created the3six5, we’d set out to create our own ’local’ the3six5, for Nigeria and Nigerians. I had the honour of kicking things off yesterday with a meditation of sorts on the interactions between birth, new beginnings and the perpetual motion machine that my life has evolved into over the last three years. Others have signed up to share a snippet of their world for all of March 2013. April is filling up. ...

In his 2012 book, How Will You measure Your Life, Clay M Christensen attempts to analyse three key life pursuits from the perspective of the theories he teaches to his MBA students at Harvard Business School, looking to extract ideas which when applied to life will ensure that the outcomes we get are aligned with the outcomes we say we want. The three areas he concentrates on are Career, Relationships and the very aptly captioned ‘Staying Out of Prison’. A few highlights: ...

WHEN MY MOTHER was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib' So begins Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography, a meditation of sorts on growing up adopted and the descent into dystopia that was her childhood; spent growing up in a Pentecostal home being groomed to be a missionary. It is a childhood that is quintessentially evangelical, replete with very regular church meetings, Biblical literalism, corporeal punishment and a feening for the apocalyptic dawn of the next world to the detriment of the enjoyment of this one. Looming large in that phase of growing up is the image of her adoptive mother, a controlling creature, intensely fundamentalist and addicted to her cigarettes, who both in her quiet moments and in her moments of rage ruled the roost,with the young Jeanette and her adoptive father as collateral damage. Being adopted, and the uncertainties this brings to family relations is a recurring motif in the book, and her successful search to find her birth mother takes us through an emotional wringer. ...

Some of my more memorable passages in Binyavanga Wainana’s witty, somewhat self deprecating if irreverent memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place relate to his early contact with Pentecostalism whilst growing up in Kenya. In one of those he describes his mother’s desire one Sunday morning to attend a church and how they end up in one that is unmistakable Pentecostal: The heat and light are blinding and people are jumping up and down and singing what sounds to me like voices from an accordion. It smells of sweat and goats. We sit. All hot and in Sunday sweaters and collars and vaseline under the hot iron roof, and people spit and start and this is because we are frying, not because God is here. ...

I finally completed Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker Prize winning book - The Sense of an Ending. Considering I felt both previous Booker Prize winners I read earlier in the year - The Finkler Question and Midnight’s Children were not easy reads, I was pleasantly surprised to find I liked this one. In addition to it being ‘readable’ [and that was the subject of a furore which threatened to engulf this year’s awards] I suspect I liked it because it explored the conflation of memory and reflection, a genre of books I’ve been drawn to since I read Teju Cole’s Open City. ...

Arthur Ashe’s moving memoir ‘Days of Grace’ ends with a heartfelt letter to his (then) six year old daughter Camera in which he unpacks all the things he suspects his illness will deny him the opportunity of telling her in future. Covering a range of categories from the importance of family, racial discrimination, loss, marriage, money and even faith, it reads like a distillation of many years of living and learning. The section where he talks about faith and religion reads like a primer for a balanced, liberal, yet essentially Judeo-Christian worldview. Excerpts below: ...