Books I Read December 14th, 2025

Gearing up for the pre-Christmas push, which for me will involve a lot of gift giving and cooking planning. And Proust reading. Such are my ambitions.

From a Crooked Rib by Nuruddin Farah – A rural Somalian everywoman escapes her home to avoid marriage, struggles against the oppressive weight of the patriarchy. Not that this was bad, but it probably hit harder in 1970.

Night of My Blood by Kofi Awoonor – At some point in my life I firmly expect to get into poetry, like I expect to get into jazz, but so far it's never been much of an interest. Reading this collection of post-colonial odes from one of mid-century Africa's most renowned poets, I realized the last time I'd read poetry was in the Old Testament. Anyway, this was evocative and powerful stuff, filled with sorrow at the decay of local custom in the face of several generations of imperialism, and fear or a future bereft of spiritual insight.

My Parent's Marriage by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond – Seeking to rebel against her powerful, philandering father, a Ghanian marries a studious would-be emigre. The characters feel real and the story is well plotted.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus – Despite (because?) of essentially having adopted its tenants, I can't say I really enjoy reading existential literature, especially non-fiction. There's a great deal of hair splitting and a tendency to over-define relatively simple concepts until they seem odiously complex.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust – There's so much genius here, and of such a varied nature, that one hesitates to know where to start. Seeing as how I'll be writing (presumably) four more of these as I make my way through his opus, what I'll say struck out particularly about this segment was Proust's talent for misdirection. This is a book in which the protagonist talks about themselves for thousands of pages and still somehow leaves you with great gaps in his life and strange holes in his character. One particularly memorable example of this arises in the first section, during which, amid sumptuous descriptions of an adolescent romance so chaste as to suggest the most profound innocence, Marcel offers a throwaway line to the effect that he was constantly frittering away his evening in whorehouses, a seemingly noteworthy fact which is basically never brought up again. Another, less sordid lacunae relates to his academic career, which, despite occasional mentions of so-and-so as a friend from school, receives literally not a word of text. It's part of the fascinatingly oblique genius of the work, that so much is explained in such eloquent and logical detail, and yet so much else remains to the reader to ponder. Really enjoying this, glad I decided to make it my Holiday project.