My Books of 2021
While the year 2020 saw me read a record 19 books, the year 2021 took me to the opposite end as I reached a new low with only 8books finished. In my defence, it was also a year in which I started a new full-time job alongside a few consulting gigs, got married, had a baby, and started an online degree. Matter of fact, it feels like a miracle that I was able to squeeze out the time to read these eight books. The silver lining to the dark cloud of too few books, however, was that I read many of the books I had intended to from last year.
So here it goes:
On Nigeria
My first book of 2021 was Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation, an excellent telling of the events, intrigues, and interactions that shaped the various peoples that make up Nigeria today even before we all were cobbled together into Nigeria by the British. This is especially as the two authors are not historians, but finance sector professionals who use simple, easy-to-understand language to narrate our pre-colonial history. Perhaps the biggest point for me from the book is that long before the British, there has been a great deal of interaction between the peoples of the area. In other words, we are not such strange bedfellows as some might have you believe.
One book that I have been yearning to read for at least four years has been Alex Thurston’s Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching & Politics which discusses the birth and rise of Salafist Islam in Nigeria from a theological and political viewpoint. I finally got a copy courtesy of a generous gift and I jumped into it with much gusto. On one hand, I realized I underestimated how much I knew about the subject matter. On the other hand, it shed a lot of light on the power plays and theological debates between Salafist and Sufi Islam in Nigeria.
Chris Ngwodo’s Fate of the Union deconstructs Nigeria’s fractious identity politics and how our elevating our religious and ethnic identities above our national identity has shaped our politics in very destructive ways. Case in point: it is just about a year to the 2023 elections and there are a lot of names being bandied around as potential presidential candidates; however, the campaigns for and by them are almost entirely around their identities and not around the strength of their ideas (which they have not even presented any). He also offers a way for Nigerians to forge a cohesive nation out of the patchwork of the various ethnicities and faiths within.
I used the free time I got over the Christmas period to breeze through HRH Muhammadu Sanusi II’s (formerly better known as Sanusi Lamido Sanusi) collection of essays, For the Good of the Nation. The collection contains essays, papers, and opinion pieces given by the former banker as far back as 1998 and chiefly around Nigeria’s identity politics (particularly his as a Northern Muslim) and on numerous national issues. Despite that some of the articles are 23 years old, the issues still persist to date.
The World Beyond Our Borders
I still cannot believe it that I was patient to wait until June to get a copy of Barack Obama’s A Promised Land — or perhaps I was just that overwhelmed with work and family. But once I got it, I made sure I savored every page of it. It definitely did not disappoint, in how it explained his rationale behind numerous decisions, delicious backstories, and when he couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a shot at his opponents. The best part is that this is just the first part of his presidential memoirs, and hopefully, I will snap up the succeeding ones quicker.
In 2021, I got deeper into geopolitics, bingeing on YouTube channels such as CaspianReport, and this influenced me to start reading Peter Zeitlin’s The Accidental Superpower. The book looks at the world region by region, focusing on key countries and making long-term projections on the growth of these countries based on factors such as their demographics, economy, and politics. Like the cover says, it estimates that this century will mean the decline of almost about every region and country in the world — except for the United States. However, the book which was published in 2014 has already missed some of its predictions, which is about on par for geopolitical analysts.
Random Thought
This is a book that I have had its e-copy since last year, but never got around to reading until a lazy Sunday morning made me breeze through all its 96 pages within a couple of hours. What Carlo Rovelli with his Seven Brief Lessons on Physics did was explain seven key theories in physics in simple, practical language together with some backstories and humor that any layman can understand. For me, it was like a refresher course in secondary school physics.
Fiction
I had resigned myself to the possibility that I was not going to read any fiction book in 2021, thus making my poor reading year worse compared to previous ones. But I impulsively got Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, a collection of really funny and captivating short stories of crazy relationship experiences in Lagos. It is the kind of book I totally see myself going back to read again.
So What’s the Reading Plan for 2022?
Overall, it will be to get more time to read, which I think is possible as I have found a rhythm to the new aspects of my life. Two words: time management.
Specifically, it is to read a lot of the books on my shelves that I have been gifted but never touched, such as Vincent Hirribarren’s A History of Borno which looks at how a trans-Sahelian empire of the 19th century has now become the epicenter of terrorism today, and Alec Ryrie’s Protestants: The Faith that Shaped the Modern World on how Protestant Christianity went beyond transforming faith to causing social upheavals and inspiring political revolutions.
I also have Max Siollun’s What Britain Did to Nigeria in my sights as part of continuing my reading on pre-colonial Nigeria. Another target is to overcome my hangups with reading the memoirs of Nigerian politicians as it goes counter to a constant complaint of mine that we do not put down our accounts of contemporary events enough — I might just start with Mohammed Bello Adoke’s Burden of Service.
As usual, I will make attempts to read any and every book I come across that catches my fancy, which often means my reading list will cut across numerous fields. This time, hopefully, more fiction books.
So what were you reading last year?
