My Reading Revolution!

I was moving house a few years ago, but because I didn’t own a car and I was only moving down the road, I enlisted the help of a cabbie. He took one look at my boxes and cases and burst out laughing, then charged me 4 times the going rate. I had, to be exact, 4 VERY large boxes of books (not school related). A few years and many donations later, including my first World Book day (2011), here I am: trying to recall how I developed my addiction to reading in the first place, and what it means to me.

According to my mother, I started reading at an early age, when I was about 2.5 years old (disclaimer: she’s obviously a little biased). My first recollection of reading though was Friday evening Bible study as a family. It was my opportunity to read in front of my much older siblings, without fear of being taunted when I couldn’t pronounce a word. It also cultivated a love of big words: thou, thine, offspring, commandment, covenant, gnashing, iniquity, redemption, revelation, ascension...and much simpler words like ‘I am’. Advancing age and an incapacity to understand my dad, who often said ‘imbecile’ and ‘uncouth’, made me seek out other books, and soon I was lost in the world of tiny fonts, illustrations and fantasy.

I waded through the Sweet Valley series, wishing for a sister, and piqued my interest for adventure while solving mysteries with Nancy Drew and Famous Five. I lived in my brothers’ shadows, and the only way to get noticed was to show them fancy words that would rid them of the pox of 3 Ns and U (innuendo) when playing Scrabble. I flirted with Mills and Boon, but my mother felt that was a little precocious, and pointed out that she’d assumed I could do better. There’s nothing like a bit of sarcasm to push one to greater heights, and so I fell in love with classics, with Mr Knightley and his loving reproach of Emma. Austen and I developed an intricate dance: I waltzed with Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice), and tangoed like Marianne did, even crying when her heart broke and falling in love with Mr. Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility). I took up poetry, reading about great loves, Shakespeare’s tragedies and Oscar Wilde’s plays. My older self began to yearn for a more African identity, something I was warned would happen, but at 13 I loathed to accept. Chinua Achebe helped me put my fractured identity back together, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o made me announce to all that would listen, how amazing it was to be Kenyan. More recently, Chimamanda Adichie embodied my desire for a deeper understanding of history and my quest for Africanism in her short stories and novels, especially Half a Yellow Sun.

Books are my best friends. Don’t get me wrong, I love people, but it’s the books that I read that often helped me meet these people. It’s hard to ignore the book that will invariably be in my hand, and it means we’ll always have something to talk about. I’ve learned about history: from the Israel 6 day war, to Somalia in 1993 and the history of Al-Qaeda. I’ve lived in 19^th Century Latin America following a family for 100 years (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and I have seen the dark side in the Picture of Dorian Gray, and in modern day Sweden (Stieg Larsson trilogy). I have been a lady (Little Women), I have been a vagabond (Oliver Twist), I have been a slave (Maya Angelou), I have been on a mail ship (Rudyard Kipling), I’ve been naive and awkward (the Great Gatsby) and I’ve been crazy (Oliver Sacks). I now know Mussolini was a little mad (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), and that one’s future can be in a name (Freakonomics). I experienced not knowing oneself (Middlesex), to perhaps knowing a little too much (On Chesil Beach), and I have truly seen the measure of a man (Poitier).

Books offer an adventure, a journey into a page, into someone else’s mind, and ultimately into another world. They create possibilities, and for a moment in time, make improbability a tenuous argument. They open up the hearts of children to the lives of others, allow them to relate to the imaginary, and then haul them back into reality. Reading is mental acrobatics; my brain does a back flip every morning and every evening before I drift to sleep, I absorb one ‘last’ chapter- my brain is held in a virtual tree pose as I feel my thoughts rise to another world, and the disappointments of this one become a fragment of my imagination. That is why I read, and why I wish everyone would too.

The Kenyan Reading Revolution think so too, and that’s why they’ve organised this fantastic event, which aims to get the largest number of people (25 000) reading out loud together in a single place. Details and registration here >> http://readingrevolution.co.ke/breaking-the-world-record/register-here/ If you are in Kenya on the 16^th of June or know someone that is, please get them to go to this! It will be a record well worth breaking!