I love books, and reading has always been a hobby of mine. I especially love reading books that introduce me to new concepts and new ways of looking at life.
I read books for the stories and to open myself to the ideas shared. Beyond that, I read books for the writing style. I get goosebumps whenever I come across a book that has a great story, challenges me to expand my ideas of how I look at the world, and is also well-written. And by well-written I don’t mean the book has correct spelling and grammar—those are easy to fix. I mean a book with a creative story structure, interesting sentence structures, and captivating prose. Whenever I encounter such a book, I find myself reaching for a pen and paper—or my laptop is more often the case now—and noting things that I find interesting and would like to adopt in my own writing style. I also note things that don’t seem to work so that I avoid those things in my own writing.
The notes that I take as I read books sometimes turn into the reviews that you see on this page and that I post on other sites. For the most part, these are reviews of books I’ve read at different stages of my life and that touched me deeply. Lately, I’ve been going back to read these books again to learn from them and at the same time provide my thoughts in the form of the reviews that you’ll find here. As such, these reviews are of books that I love and can recommend to others.
A fascinating read that harmoniously intermarries science and spirituality … at least in my mind.
The Synchronicity Key is a fascinating read. As a scientist by training and profession, I started getting disillusioned by science not very long ago, and have been moving toward spirituality—until I came across this book. The
Living one’s life in complete acceptance of what is, because it is.
I first read The Power of Now almost a decade ago, and it changed my life. Since then, I’ve read this book at least once a year.
In this book, Eckhart Tolle explains the meaning of living one’s
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Family drama in colonial Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing tells an ageless story of characters moving through life in what I would call absolute unconsciousness. The portrayal of Mary and her husband Dick, white farmers in Southern Rhodesia, capture the era of white supremacy over indigenous Africans. Unfortunately,
Things do fall apart when tribal beliefs clash with a foreign religion.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a classic masterpiece. It is an engrossing tale—from the colorful descriptions of tribal life in a Nigerian village before Christianity to the inevitable clashes as the new religion takes root.
Through the life of
A classic still relevant in today’s world.
Like many people, I read Animal Farm as part of my high school curriculum and understood its meaning even at that young age. I just recently read it again—a few decades later—after I came across a review that made me want to revisit the
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An awe-inspiring read about growing up white in Zimbabwe.
I very much enjoyed reading Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa. Though a memoir, this book reads like a novel. I found myself captivated by the plot, and had to constantly remind myself that what I was reading was an account of someone’s life. Peter
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Poignant memoir of an author’s visits to a country that holds her childhood home.
In African Laughter, Doris Lessing’s nostalgia for a country she left behind is palpable. Even though the main focus of the book is to give an account of the author’s visits to Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1992,