My earliest reading memory
The Ladybird key words series. My parents bought a lot of picture books for me, but I was more interested in their books. I remember thumbing through novels long before I could recognise more than a few words on each page.
My favourite book growing up
Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Eddie Iroh’s Without a Silver Spoon moved me to tears. I adored the Sherlock Holmes stories for how they held me in thrall long after I’d closed the books. I remember reading The Hound of the Baskervilles while I was in primary school and thinking it was the best thing I’d ever read. It outdid The Adventure of the Speckled Band, which had been my favourite Arthur Conan Doyle mystery until then.
The book that changed me as a teenager
During a visit to my grandparents when I was 14 or 15, I discovered a stack of books an aunt had read for her O-levels. I was immediately drawn to Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and stayed up all night until I had followed Adah through to the end of the novel. It was such a vivid, searing read. I’d already started writing regularly by then, so I found the scene where one of Adah’s manuscripts is destroyed terrifying.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I read The Go-Between by LP Hartley when I was nine or 10. I finished it just before bed and could not sleep for hours. This was partly because I couldn’t stop crying. Through the tears, I was also wondering, how did Hartley make me care so deeply about Marian, Ted and Leo? This was one step away from thinking, I want to create something this affecting someday. Later on, when I was in secondary school, I reread Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born until my copy fell apart. It made me want to write something that could be more luminous when re-encountered.
The book or author I came back to
I couldn’t finish Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre initially, but I went back to it after I’d read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.
The book I reread
I love to reread books. If I enjoyed it the first time around, more often than not, the second read is even more illuminating. Occasionally, I go back to a book I did not like the first time to see if I missed something and I’ve discovered a few favourites this way. The books I’ve revisited the most include TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventures and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The book I am currently reading
I’m reading A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo and rereading Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa.
My comfort read
When I was an undergraduate, I would reread Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows if I was in a bad mood. Maybe I would have articulated what I was reaching for as comfort then. Now, I think it is more precise to say I turned to it for enchantment.
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