Sunday, August 09, 2015

Book #32: Americanah

I've been wanting to read something by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ever since I discovered her 2009 TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story. Worth it, for sure.

In that talk, she explores the way we risk serious misunderstanding if we know one story about a person or a culture and think as a result that we know that person or culture.

We are all more complex than the labels we put on ourselves and one another. We are all more complex than the assumptions we make based on the few things we know.

We are all more than a single story.

And so is this book.

Why do people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing, Adichie writes part way through.

Indeed.

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