The Flame of Freedom

This book is about the struggle and life of the former prime minister of kenya Raila Odinga. The book started from his childhood in Maseno town in Kisumu. It quickly jumps forward when he decided to pursue his political career.
Raila odinga lost two presidential elections and is now probably going to run for is third. In 2007 he infamously ran for the presidential candidacy that led into the post election violence. This book talks about his struggle to reach to the top but according to him it was ruined by vote rigging in the kibaki election, though that was never found out. Also in the most recent election in 2013 he accused Uhuru Kenyatta of rigging but the supreme court said it was false allegations.

Here are a couple of novels I read recently:

Freedom is a kind of family saga, covering three generations in the USA from the 1960s to about 2008.  Walter is the slightly nerdy son of a beer-swilling motel owner whose room-mate at college, Richard, becomes a reluctantly successful rock star.  Walter's wife, Patty, finds it difficult to choose between him and Richard, and never really manages to do so.  Meanwhile, Walter works for an environmental organisation and tries to save a species of bird by destroying an entire mountain.

Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino contains three novellas.  My favourite is "The Baron in the Trees".  The twelve-year-old son of a baron hates being told what to do by his parents, runs outside, climbs a tree and declares he's never coming down.  He doesn't: he spends his entire life in the branches of the trees which are close enough to climb between, and numerous enough to cover most of northern Italy and southern France. He eats, sleeps, washes, goes to the toilet in the trees; he hunts for his food, and eventually organises battles and finds a girlfriend up there.    

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

I saw the movie of The Memoirs of a Geisha and then read the book, and now just recently saw the movie again and read the book once more throughout the past weeks. Re-reading a book of so much emotion, the tales of raw seduction in Imperial Japan before the influence of the American soldiers that came after the war, and the bombings, has made me understand the importance of reading twice. When you first read a book, everything mesmerises you and you simply want to keep reading, to see what is going to happen, to see what insane thing is going to proceed the terrible event that just happened, or the  happy event, you want to know if it will be crushed. When you read the book a second time you see that you were actually missing out a lot, inferred statements, opinions that had a double meaning, moments that seemed trivial, unimportant, but in fact you were missing out on the entire weight of it altogether.

Chiyo's (who later becomes Sayuri, her geisha name) journey was the journey of many women throughout Japan that had the same fate, a beauty since she was a girl, she had the pressure of perfection thrust upon her after being sold by her own poverty stricken family, put into a job that required beauty, that required to be delicate, to learn from the women you would compete against, because you were competing for attention, for cravings, you would have to compete against the girl that was your friend as you grew up, and would need to be fine with her trying to ruin your reputation, to be better than her was the priority. 

I believe that each other character in the book represents a piece of Chiyo's character, split into pieces. Her mentor, Mameha, is Chiyo's kindness, her femininity, and the person that makes her find herself in the game of being a geisha. As her mentor, Mameha also became her mother, and therefore the missing feminine figure throughout Chiyo's childhood. Hatsumomo, the geisha that later becomes her greatest rival, the most jealous woman, and also the one that wants to ruin Chiyo, is the hate within Chiyo, the hate that could develop, but never does thankfully. Hatsumomo also represents Chiyo's pain, the pain of being separated from her sister, the competition between women, the sadness of not being able to be with the Chairman. The Chairman represents all that is good in Chiyo, her love, her beauty, her happiness, all that makes her the exquisite girl she is. 

The book is exquisite, and must be read by everyone, even men, due to the fact that they can learn a few things about the pressure of being perfect and how important it is to be beautiful, and the challenges women have to go through for men.

'Too Much Happiness' by Alice Munro

A novel I have recently finished reading is ‘Too Much Happiness’ by Alice Munro. The novel is divided into various little stories. The first is about a young wife and mother who is in unbearable pain after having lost her three children. In another, a young woman, impacted by an unusual yet humbling seduction, reacts in a clever fashion. The other stories uncover the problematic issues of a marriage, the traumatic cruelty of children, and how the distorted face of a boy leads him to good yet also bad things in his life.

In the long title story, we escort a late nineteenth-century Russian mathematician and émigré, Sophia Kovalevsky, on a winter journey taking her to Paris, Germany and Denmark, all the way from the Riviera, to visit her lover. In Denmark we accompany her to a decisive meeting with a local doctor, and from then on to Sweden where she goes to the only university existing in Europe at the time, willing to be employed as a female mathematician.

In this novel, Alice Munro delivers difficult events and emotions into stories that focus on the unreliable course in which men and women transcend what happens in their lives. Munro has a particular manner in which she roots her stories in the point of view of an individual character whose reflective tone is initially captivating to the reader. The author creates a connection between the reader and the protagonist, then throughout the action of the story, makes you wish you had withheld what you had thought of her before, due to the judgment you hold for her as the story developes.

Personally, I found this book incredibly beguiling and recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about deception and destruction.

Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

Kant's most famous book, that I'd been wanting to read for a long time. This is my first time reading a work by Kant, and I was surprised to find that it was (or at least what I have read so far was) much easier to understand than I'd expected, although I think that prior knowledge of his metaphysical philosophy is still required. 

  

The book is, however, by no means an easy read. Kant writes with less structure compared to Wittgenstein, and tends to say a lot to get a single idea across, unlike Nietzsche, the two philosophers whose works I have written about in earlier posts, making the book unnecessarily confusing. For example, he mentions that "we cannot have any external intuition of time" in §2 of Transcendental Aesthetic, and only explains why that was the case in § 7. 

Some say that he does this on purpose to make his readers think and to discourage stupid people from reading the book, so as to avoid being misunderstood. I myself am still towards the beginning of Transcendental Analytic (about a fifth into the book), and am reading another book (on which I will make another post soon) every few pages to give my eyes and brains rest. I must say that if I hadn't heard that Kant made the book so unclear on purpose, I would not have bothered reading his own works at all, as it is his ideas rather than his writing that are interesting. 

The ideas explored in the book, on the other hand, excite me as much as Wittgenstein's did when I was reading about him, and would definitely recommend everyone to take a look at them at some point. What I love about Kant, Descartes, Wittgenstein, along with other philosophers, is that they realise that we are limited, and although metaphysics is a subject with no practical use, awareness of one's restriction (and identification of it where possible) is a valuable lesson.

TL;DR Don't read the book because it explains things badly and his philosophy, which you really should check out, is explained in all corners of the Internet, as well  as in innumerable books in all the languages you can name.

"Phantom" by Jo Nesbo

During this holiday, I chose the novel "Phantom" by Jo Nesbo. This novel written by a Norwegian musician and writer, captivated my attention immediately but as I read further, I found myself even more entertained by this bizarre yet fascinating fictional story.

The story portrayed in the novel is written from many different viewpoints, allowing the reader to create a few perspectives of what is going on throughout the chapters. Phantom is the ninth instalment of this series however a crucial one because we learn more about the main character, Harry Hole, and become more attached to him. The story takes place in Oslo, Norway where Harry is undergoing a private investigation on a drug-related murder. This leads him deeper into the darker side of human kind where he becomes more aware of the drug addiction and production on the streets, gang wars, corruption and a dangerous, powerful Russian known as Dubai. This man is known as "a kind of phantom" because he is known amongst all those who are aware he exists, as a man impossible to catch, like the wind.

As a reader, there are certain times in the novel where I had had to put down the book before recontinuing because of the dark way in which Nesbo creates the atmosphere. From the desperate addicts mourning on the streets to the moments where gunshots push innocent men into their death beds.

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading dark and intense novels. 

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

During this past vacation, I decided to read Purple Hibiscus. I had never heard anything about it, but several people recommended it to me, so I decided to give it a shot. All I can say is that this was not a bad decision at all.

At the beginning, I was not so sure about the book, and almost gave up on it, simply because it was moving very slowly. Thankfully, I decided to stick with it. As the pace of the book increased, I found myself more and more captivated by Kambili's story. This book is situated in Nigeria, the birthplace of the author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is story of a young girl who comes from a very catholic family, with a very strict father. Her relationship with her father is full of respect, but extremely violent, and she suffers multiple physical punishments, along with her brother, Jaja.