I have talked so much about my mailbox these last entries that I think I should name one category ‘mailbox’.
Today was no exception: I opened my mailbox and two books came tumbling out, much to my delight.

Blixen and Adichie

The Blixen book I received for the tweet I talked about in my earlier post. It is so pwetty! I think I will wait a while before reading it, and just enjoy its crisp, white cover for a while before I smudge it with my ever so clumsy butterfingers.
The second one I received so I could review it. And this one I will definitely start on today. I have bought Adichie’s earlier book ‘Half of a yellow sun’ – which coincidentally is also on my ever-growing to-read-in-summer list – so I contemplated if I should read that one first, but really, I don’t really see the point in keeping up with chronology.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is Nigerian, educated in the USA and has written two novels before this one. ‘Half of a yellow sun’ is set in 1960’s Nigeria in civil war-time and it centers on three main characters.
‘The thing around your neck’ (the book on the photo) is a collection of short stories, originally published in 2009 and translated/published to Danish in June, 2010.
I have never read (that I remember, or know of) any African writers’ works, so I am looking forward to see how she writes, and what she writes about. It seems that Africa is for the most part narrated in the Western culture through monetary/monitory voices, so it will be nice to hear from the people who actually grow up and live in Africa. With the craze of the World Cup in South Africa, where the vuvuzela has been no. 1 item on news channels’ report list, it has managed to overshadow every other good story they could run about this fascinating country. So I will turn off my TV (my mother and brother are going: “Blasphemy!!”), make a good cup of tea and sit in my chair reading my way through Africa, until the day I walk the continent and see it for myself.