During this summer’s Flow School, Flowstar Colin Ford facilitated a blog-writing workshop, encouraging even our non-writers to show off their talents. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing the homework assignments from that session. This is the seventh and final post of the series.
Some prefer a good shoe that will last them long after they’ve walked, stomped, trudged and trodden everywhere their hearts desire. I, on the other hand, prefer books that will keep me just as captivated the 18th time I read them, as they did the first time I turned the cover page.
Here are five titles you just have to buy and read. After all, what use is a good book if all it does is gather dust, prop up your laptop or balance the TV?
- Maru – Bessie Head
If this book title doesn’t ring a bell, then you’re either too young or never went to a cool school that had this book as part of its matric English literature syllabus.
Maru is about an orphaned Masarwa girl who goes to Dilepe, a village in Botswana, to teach, only to discover that in this village her own people are treated as outcasts.
It is a book full of intrigue, and an interesting love story.
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah
This is one of those books that will break your heart and make you want to reach into the pages and rip these child soldiers out of the hell that is their lives.
A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah’s first-hand account of his life as a child soldier in the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone, after he was separated from his family and forced to join an army unit.
Read this one at home, alone, with a year’s supply of Kleenex.
- Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela – Hugh Masekela and Michael Cheers
This book takes you through the life of world-renowned South African jazz musician Bra Hugh Masekela. It’s funny, captivating, educational and not exactly for innocent eyes.
By the time you finish reading you’ll feel as though you’re one of his old-time buddies, who has been there through his every experience. The book also helps put into context some of his famous hits, such as Marketplace and African Secret Society.
- The Colour of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother – James McBride
The Colour of Water tells the remarkable story of a Polish Jew, Ruth McBride Jordan (born Rachel Shilsky), the two good men she married, the 12 children she raised and how she left her family and faith behind in Virginia when she moved to the Big Apple – New York City.
Being a white Jewish mother to 12 black children, whose shades of skin ranged from caramel to the colour of dark chocolate, she not only faced racism and poverty, but also withstood the painful tests that life threw her way.
The book will not only inspire you, it will leave you with an in-depth admiration for a flawed but remarkable individual.
- The Far Side – Gary Larson
Cartoon strips like The Far Side are proof that even grown-ups can have a laugh sometimes. In fact, it should be mandatory for adults to read titles like The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Zits.
I mean, what else will help us keep the little sanity we have left in this world of 9-to-5, Eskom and e-tolls?