Looking for a Good Book To Read? New York City Has You Covered.

The New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment launched its One Book New York initiative in February of this year to encourage a love of reading and a feeling of community among New Yorkers. Celebrities such as Danielle Brooks, Bebe Neuwirth, and William H. Macy hit social media to encourage New Yorkers to vote for one of five books to be THE book that we would all be reading together this year. The books in contention were: Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. In early March, it was announced that THE book would be Americanah. It is basically being read by the largest book club in America.

#OneBookNY

Thousands of people will be reading this book and talking about it through among other things, social media. The hashtag for the initiative is #OneBookNY. There is a link to a reader’s discussion guide for Americanah on the Mayor’s Office website and there will be a number of events all over New York City in association with the book, which is part love story as well as a dual immigrant tale. One of the lovers is a West African immigrant woman in New York City and the other is a West African immigrant man in London. I purchased Americanah a while and never got around to reading it so I am grateful that this program has finally prompted me to do so.

Race, Class, Culture, and… Comparative Colonization?

What I personally find interesting about the book is that from a socio-historical perspective, there are many layers to this tale. Adichie is to be commended for not shying away from this sort of not just multicultural investigation but also a comparative review of a number of intersecting phenomena. We have two main characters from a West African nation formerly colonized by Britain. They, at least at the outset, are in love with each other but must be apart from each other for a time. One is a man, and one is a woman so that implies one way in which they experience the world differently. The woman, Ifemelu emigrates to America, a former colonizer just not her country’s colonizer. However, she shares a historical experience with America in that Britain also colonized America. Obinze emigrates to Britain, which was his country’s former colonizer. The character, Ifemelu is unable to avoid questions of race and culture which are heavily informed by methods of colonization. In Obinze’s rise in social mobility, we are also perhaps greeted with fraught questions about class as it relates to America, England, and Nigeria. Also, the two characters end up going back home. Do their experiences living in another country make them appreciate or denigrate their native lands? To top it all off, there is the age-old question of whether love can conquer all. Can Ifemelu and Obinze’s love survive the many twists and turns of their lives? Read Americanah with the rest of New York City and find out!

#Society #Books