About ten years ago, I began a journey with the Daily Trust on Sunday family writing one of Nigeria’s most amazing columns on books. When I started it, the Trust, believing in me and the column offered a full page for me to share my book recommendations, my thoughts and my interviews with a myriad of persons on their favourite books. This column has seen book interests by award winning writers across the world, regular authors like me and you, ordinary persons, technocrats, professionals, housewives and persons young and old. The thrill of delivering this column every week for ten years has been one of the highlights of my life, week after week. I have received commendation letters from far and wide, letters from people the column has inspired and made friends from across the world. The readers of this column have been from different demographics and come from different ethnic groups.
Books know no tribe nor gender and the collections over the years have comforted many people in their pain and celebrated many others in their joy. Our themes have included but have not been limited to books for millennials, books for team building, nation building, entrepreneurship and books in times of happiness and grief.
I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this column and I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Today this column comes to an end on this platform, but will be placed on another platform for your reading pleasure when I have taken the desired rest and re-booted. I promise to keep you posted when this is ready. I would like to thank Daily Trust on Sunday, all my editors and those in the background who organised the page to make it so beautiful week after week. Thank you for your partnership.
Here then are snippets from our memories which I would want you to hold dear as I bow out of this platform but not out of the column. May your reading days never be over… Amen
1. About ten years ago, I began a journey with the Daily Trust on Sunday family writing one of Nigeria’s most amazing columns on books. When I started it, the Trust, believing in me and the column offered a full page for me to share my book recommendations, my thoughts and my interviews with a myriad of persons on their favourite books. This column has seen book interests by award winning writers across the world, regular authors like me and you, ordinary persons, technocrats, professionals, housewives and persons young and old. The thrill of delivering this column every week for ten years has been one of the highlights of my life, week after week. I have received commendation letters from far and wide, letters from people the column has inspired and made friends from across the world. The readers of this column have been from different demographics and come from different ethnic groups.
Books know no tribe nor gender and the collections over the years have comforted many people in their pain and celebrated many others in their joy. Our themes have included but have not been limited to books for millennials, books for team building, nation building, entrepreneurship and books in times of happiness and grief.
I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this column and I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Today this column comes to an end on this platform, but will be placed on another platform for your reading pleasure when I have taken the desired rest and re-booted. I promise to keep you posted when this is ready. I would like to thank Daily Trust on Sunday, all my editors and those in the background who organised the page to make it so beautiful week after week. Thank you for your partnership.
Here then are snippets from our memories which I would want you to hold dear as I bow out of this platform but not out of the column. May your reading days never be over… Amen
2. I have spent a long time in the company of The Prophet. A book written in 1923 by Lebanese American Poet and illustrator Khalil Gibran. This book full of wisdom cannot be erased from a book collection memory. I have recommended it severally over the years. I want you to have it as a keepsake when you remember this column. The Prophet Al Mustafa is leaving Orphalese where he has lived for 12 years and he encounters a group of persons, children, women and men who asks him to educate them about the human condition before he departs. These poems touch on life from different perspectives, joy, love, marriage, religion, beauty, children and death among other issues. Translated into more than one hundred languages, it is considered one of the most translated books of all times. Keep it by your bedside to energise you when you wake up and comfort you when you go to bed. It is highly recommended.
3. I am very fond of Maya Angelou’s collections. Her biographical collection starting with “I know where the caged bird sings” and her poetry collection, including “Still I rise” are a collector’s master pieces. But I found two of her other books pretty enthralling. These are the books that speak about her grandmother and her difficult relationship with her mother “Mom & Me & Mom” and her cookery book where she celebrates every recipe with a friend or family member associated with it. A celebration of food. Halleluyah! The welcome Table, a lifetime of memories with recipes is one of my favourite books by Maya Angelou. I am currently writing a cookbook which is slow on the uptake and this book is one of my guides and a veritable resource.
4. I have read Malcolm Gladwell for years and years and I have every single book he has ever written. I cannot even decide which I prefer. Is it David and Goliath or its Blink or what the dog saw. Described as one of the greatest thinkers of his generation, Malcolm Gladwell takes investigative journalism and non-fiction to a whole new level. It is from one of his books that I learnt that the many South American plane tragedies that had become a thing of concern was connected to culture of deference to older persons and authority where it was impossible to give a contrary view to a senior pilot in the face of danger and this led to many crashes of the South Korean airlines. It was eye-opening. Find Malcolm Gladwell. Award winning writer, Time magazine’s most influential 100 persons and a New York Times writer. Find his books, listen to his podcasts, read him wherever you can.
5. So as our journey together in this column comes to an end in The Daily Trust on Sunday, I celebrate all our readers for keeping the faith. As you wait to find the column’s new home, let me share a few things with you on my own trajectory. So you can still read my poetry collection, “Don’t look at me like that” and you can expect a re-run of my first book, “In the blink of an Eye”. In addition, do look out for my next book by the first quarter of next year, “So, you want to be an MC, Tales and tips from a veteran Event Compere.”
You will all be sorely missed. I thank you all for your support over the years. It was the oxygen that kept me going no matter where I was, in the wilderness, in a far flung country, at a place with no internet or even when I did not feel like it, to deliver this column to you irrespective of the circumstances, week after week. I am thankful. My details remain the same.
BONUS BOOK:
It is impossible to let you have all the books I would like to share for memory here but I hope I tried. Here are a few more.
a) Isabelle Allende’s Aphrodite
b)Any book by Abubakar Gimba.
c) Chimamanda’s The thing around your neck
d)Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
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