Reading old fiction

They say what you read defines you in more ways than you can imagine.  When you start reading, you have to look out because there is a danger of becoming a bookworm. And you don’t want to be a bookworm; you don’t want to be soulless and stupid and a boring robot that repeats facts like they are on rote.

So I looked at what sits on my shelf and failed to psycho-analyse myself. I don’t know what my books say about me but I hope to God it’s not something sick. There are books on the shelf that I will never read. They are there because someone in the house wants them there. Then there are those that I have read over and over again and their dog-ears are truly a result of over use.

Of course after interacting with the reclusive writers and avid readers, Brian Magoba, Michael Akiyo and David Tumusiime, I realised that reading the classics actually makes you cool. So I put this site on my Favourites along with my long list of blogs.

As you’ll notice, I read almost anything. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I had Jesus the Man somewhere and I was looking to read someone else with the guts of Dr Theiring; to take on the world about time-held beliefs, but someone borrowed it and decided it was too evil for me and they destroyed it.

Presenting…what’s on my shelf.

Harrap’s Shorter Dictionnaire Anglais/ Francais – Anglais

Smith – Greer – Keepsakes for the Heart

Andy Rooney – Word for Word

Barry Harrison – Economics

Herman Wouk – War and Remembrance

Kazuo Ishiguro – When we were Orphans

First Aid, Safety Oriented

Rick Warren – A Purpose Driven Life

Tom Clancy – Rainbow Six

Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote

Robert Ludlum – The Road to Omaha

Martin Luther King – Strength to Love

Stephen King – The Bachman Books

Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Code

V. C. Andrews – Petals on the Wind

Josh McDonell – More than a Carpenter

Cool Daily Bible Readings for Kids

Max Hodes – So you think you’re a Movie Buff?

Catherine Cookson – The Wingless Bird

Jilly Cooper – Appassionata

The Big Book of Sudoku, Compiled by Mark Huckvale

Charles Dickens – David Copperfield

Oxford School French Dictionary Webster’s New Word Pocket French

Joyce Meyer – Why God Why?

Cathy Kelly – She’s the One

Thomas Keneally – The Fear

Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist

J. Maurus – A Woman’s Guide to a Happy Home

Victor Pearce – Weighing the Evidence

Sheila Mottley – Tough Cookie

Marc Olden – Gossip

Oswald Chambers – He Shall Glorify Me

Eric Lustbader – White Ninja

James A. Michener – The Novel

Shaun Hutson – Captives

Shaun Hutson – Breeding Ground

Dionys Burger – Sphereland

George Orwel – Nineteen Eighty-Four

Arthur Miller – The Crucible

Robert Parrish – Growing Up in Hollywood

David A. Seamands – Healing for Damaged Emotions

Terry Looker and Olga Gregson – Managing Stress

Herbert Asbury – The Gangs of New York

Jo Carr, Imogene Sorley – Bless This Mess and Other Prayers

The Canadian World Almanac and Book of Facts 1989

Anne Sandberg – John Newton, author of Amazing Grace

Holy Bible, New International Version

Word of God, King James Version

Charles E. Fuller, J. Elwin Wright – Manna in the Morning

Selwyn Hughes, Trevor J. Patridge – Cover to Cover, Through the Bible as it Happened

Henri Nouwen – The Genesee Diary, Report from a Trappist Monastery

Jonathan Kellerman – Monster

Jane Kirkpatrick – A Sweetness to the Soul

F. J. Wright – Commercial Law

Anant Pai – How to Develop a Super Memory

Roger B. Yepsen Jr – How to Boost Your Brain Power

Joyce Meyer Ministry – Dare to Believe, Live Praise and Worship Songbook

Imagination: The World of Inner Space

Linda Clearwater – The Lord’s Prayer for Children

Francais I

Canadian Edition Creative Living

Clifford R. Anderson – Modern Ways to Health II

African Woman Volume 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

Joseph B. Omunuk – Fundamental Accounting for Business

Just browsing

Sometimes, when I look away for a moment, the devil creeps in and pulverizes my defenses so I can’t resist when I see a Shaun Hutson novel. Normally, I try to stay the hell away from Hutson, not because he is scarier than King or that I am spooked by the things some of these people write but because I feel guilty when I read American fiction. I mean, what about! There are great Ugandans and Kenyans writing banging stories and I am here reading about some crazy guy called Thad Beaumont?

 

Anyway, about Hutson, after reading him this week, I was trying to post something about the unfairness of life no matter what station one is in life. About being stalked by bad luck no matter how hard you try to be good to the world; the senseless crashes on the Ugandan roads, the gory abortions in dimly lit back street clinics, where scared girls have no one to turn to because they’ve fallen pregnant; having to slave for an unapreciative system, which gives back less than 10% of what you put in while the top dogs spend their time philandering on the Riviera…

 

I just read Captives, not a very good story (I have the feeling that this dude is always going to be in the shadow of the American Stephen King). It’s like he has to bang it onto our heads that his trademark is the disembodied eye dangling from an optical nerve. Totally gross. Totally unoriginal.

 

Actually, I have always been a Stephen King follower. I have read every one of his books that I came across like it was a law set by the powers that be. When I start reading a “horror” novel, subconsciously I search for mentions of Derry, Maine. That’s where all the crazy things happen, right? I want to read something spooky along the lines of Christine or Pet Sematary. So when I get a book that feels like the writer had a good idea which bored him along the way, yet the publisher was giving him grief to finish the damn thing so he decided to give it any kind of ending, I start missing good ol’ Stevie. Hutson should make up his mind; does he want to write horror or violent fiction?

 

Nevertheless, the story almost inspired a post. I wanted to write something deep like I am a reincarnation of Minega or this guy or good old Undo. (Say what happened to Jane?) I wanted to be better than these ass-kickers in this post. I wanted to sound as sophisticated as Angelo does when he is on radio or stressing some point about the dirt in our intellidence services. When I started typing, the idea started feeling ridiculous and continued downward from there until I pressed Ctrl + A and Delete. It had become that bad.

 

So now I am back at one. And you don’t have to point out that I just used a bad cliché again.

 

 

 

News from the trenches

I just finished reading The Diary of a Young Girl. Finally. I was getting riled by the fact that people all around me seemed to have read it many centuries ago and I was the last dino still roaming earth. 

 

So a kind soul saw my plight and said, “Hey you there, catch!”

 

And that’s how I got to read Anne Frank’s poignant story. Seriously, if she’d been living in our age and maybe cooped up in some hole in Zimbabwe, maybe, hiding from the vigilantes of Robert Mugabe, this is probably what her blog would have been like. Coz she’d have been blogging, right?

 

The waiting that the eight people in the commune have to endure is maddening. The boredom even in the midst of the terror makes the stories told since Escape From Sobibor to The Pianist about that long gone war even more real. You know how when you haven’t gone through it, it all seems incredible so you dismiss it as some brilliant fiction. It also helps me to explain why people who’ve gone through high pressure seem to survive but with something internally altered. They have this Eff Off attitude which seems to be hardwired even in their descendants. 

 

Then the way it all ends…I was there saying to myself that maybe I shouldn’t have read it in the first place. Like that movie where Meg Ryan dies right after her dude throws away the chance to live forever. Sometimes I just want to go into the minds of the creators of all this fiction and straighten them out. Oh, sorry, Anne Frank was not a figment of some crazy mind.

 

And also, the other time I was watching The Simpsons Movie, the flick that prophesied that Hillary would win the Presidency, (Hehehe NOT!!!) and…killer quote: 

 

“Listen kid, nobody likes to wear clothes in public but it’s the law.” Cop to Bart on the street.

 

 

 

Scratch that

If you’ve read The Concubine you will agree that Amadi  cheated us. Many read it while they were still young and they still believed in endless love and happily-ever-after. So to go and twist a beautiful story full of the promise of the greatest happily-ever-after was downright rude.

 

So what did Double-O Seven do?

 

We go back to that point when the Sea King decided to take out this insolent earthling, warrabout! The monster is there rearing its ugly head and rolling its bulbous eyes, trying to impress some unknown entity.

 

New Hero: Hey, HEY! Now look here you limp excuse for a boogeyman, even that little girl sitting over there playing with Barbie would laugh at you, listen good; the chick’s chosen and her choice is not you, so get back in your box.

 

Sea King: Vroo, I mean VROOOOOO!

 

New Hero: Now you are trying to be Ragga Dee? That’s low, even for you, mate.

 

Sea King: I can’t believe it. No human has ever tried to even think of facing me and you, little, ugly …thing, you are there arguing with me?

 

New Hero: I can do more…(reaching up, standing on his toes and pinching Sea King’s ear).

 

Sea King: Awww! That’s not fair. That’s nowhere in the script. Director, cut. I have to go to the bathroom.

 

New Hero: Don’t change the subject. No one will feel sorry for you. I have been hearing things, I believe they were inspired by palm wine or something, that you are tying on that Ihuoma chick? In fact, that are tying yourself on her. Don’t you ever listen to DC?

 

Sea King: DC?

 

New Hero: Destiny’s Child. a chick group that became famous for singing songs that said told the world that they were a frustrated trio that enjoyed sour-graping. I mean, have you heard Survivor?

 

Sea King: Dude, Survivor’s so 1990s. You are so…retro.

 

New Hero: Your mama.

 

Sea King: VROOOOOOOO and also ROARRRRRRRR!

 

New Hero: Um….right. As I was saying, I said to myself, “Surely that joker can’t be holding the world hostage, mbu refusing to let go of a chick who doesn’t even like you.”

 

Sea King: YOU WILL NOT REFER TO HER IN THOSE TERMS! She is a Goddess.

 

New Hero: I heard that two dudes have already died because you pulled some freak accidents. Who could have thought that you have any imagination in that mop of snakes?

 

Director: Cut. This production is just too boring. CUT, CUT, CUT. I said this has to end. Hey you Sea Devil or whatever you want to be called, whatever gets you off, this is not a shrink’s couch. Stop crying here. If you want to pull those stunts, just go find that Ihuoma chick. I hear she has weird taste in men.Maybe she can handle you.

 

New Hero: Director, I suggest we get Rasta Rob, I mean Master Rob . He’s a good actor and I hear he got tired of kyeyo. He’s a good actor and I hear he got tired of kyeyo.