Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Yellow Covers

 

 

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is Characters from Different Books Who Should Team Up (or date, be friends with, etc.) (Submitted by Cathy @ WhatCathyReadNext) but I am going off piste!


Last weekend we went to an exhibition of French artist Pierre Bonnard. We saw a poster there that he created in the 1890s and I am seriously contemplating buying a print to put in our dining room. It's a bit odd really because yellow is not usually my colour, and the poster was very yellow.


So here are ten books with yellow covers.

Honey: Recipes from a Beekeepers Kitchen by Amy Newsome - I recently bought this cookbook!

Heartbake: A Bittersweet Memoir by Charlotte Ree - This is on my TBR list!

The Wonderful Thing About Phoebe Rose by Josephine Moon - I recently had this out from the library but had to return it unread unfortunately!

Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan - I read this short story collection years ago and loved it!

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  - Gosh, it's been a long time since I read this book (my review)

The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey - Another book I read years ago.

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley - Among the many series that I keep on saying I really need to get back to soon is the Flavia de Luce mystery series, featuring a precocious young girl as the sleuth. This is book 3 in the series.


Yellowface by R F Kuang - This book seems to be everywhere at the moment, so I had to include it in a list of books with yellow covers

Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies by Vicky Zimmerman - I bought this book a while ago but still haven't read it! 


Lemon Meringue Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke - Another book I read years ago!

Can you think of any other books with yellow covers?

Six Degrees of Separation: Beezus and Ramona to Digging Up Dirt

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month's starting point was Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary. I struggled with this as a starting point as, while I have heard of Ramona Quimby, I don't remember reading any of Cleary's books when I was young. I must have done I think but that was a long time ago. I therefore thought about the name Ramona, which led me to my first link.

Ramona Koval is an Australian media personality, who features at many of our local literary festivals, as well as those around the world. She was host of The Morning Show on our national broadcaster, the ABC, and then on The Book Show. She is also a published author, so my first book is going to be By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life.

When I was looking for some of the interviews that Koval has done over the years, I came across this interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote Half of a Yellow Sun. I don't read books set in Nigeria all that often anymore, but when I do I find them very interesting. Part of the reason is that my son's father is Nigerian which gives my son some Nigerian heritage.

Another book set in Nigeria that I remember really enjoying is Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson.

Christie Watson also wrote a memoir of her life as a nurse called The Language of Kindness: A Nurses Story

Over the years, I have read many books where the main character is a nurse, but I have chosen The Desert Nurse by Australian author Pamela Hart, set in WWI Egypt.

Pamela Hart's latest book moves away from historical fiction and is called Digging up Dirt, which is a mystery where a body is found when doing home renovations! This seems like a very fitting place to finish seeing as we are renovating our ensuite this weekend. Luckily we didn't find a body underneath the floorboards...just some old bricks and things.

Next month's starting point will be winner of the 2021 Stella Prize The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Colour in the Titles

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Books with Colours in the Title.

When I looked at my books read spreadsheet, I realised that I could have done entire Top Ten lists of red and blue books. Instead, I am going to focus on the primary colours - red blue and yellow - to make up my list for this week.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chinamanda Ngozi Adiche - I have long had an interest in reading books set in Nigeria. This was a particularly good one.

The Girl in the Yellow Vest by Loretta Hill - This is a book features a female engineer working in a construction environment in Queensland. I really enjoyed Loretta Hill's writing. It doesn't look like she is writing anymore which is a shame.

The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey - I do enjoy a book set in Ireland. This one is set in Northern Ireland in the early years of the 1900's which was quite a tumultuous time.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland  - This book follows a painting of a girl (in hyacinth blue) through the years from owner to owner. I really enjoyed this book!

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore - This is the third book in the Graceling YA fantasy series. Just thinking about this book makes me want to revist the series.

Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith - This is the seventh book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and features a pair of talking shoes.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - This book holds a special place in my blogging heart. I read this book and I just wanted to talk to someone about it and it become the first book I wrote a review of. When I read it years later it wasn't a great review but it was the start of this blogging journey.

The Red Tree by Shaun Tan - Shaun Tan writes and illustrates the most amazing books. Whilst The Arrival is my favourite, and probably always will be, this was an enjoyable.

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley - Among the many series that I keep on saying I really need to get back to soon is the Flavia de Luce mystery series, featuring a precocious young girl as the sleuth. This is book 3 in the series.

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - I am cheating for this last book because once you have all the primary colours you can make all the other colours, which quite frankly is magic!

What colourful reads do you have on your Top Ten list.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In 1960's Nigeria, at the time of the vicious Nigeria-Biafra war, three characters are swept up in the rapidly unfolding political events. One is Ugwu, a young boy from a poor village, who is employed as a houseboy for a university lecturer. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has come to live with the professor, abandoning her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the idealism and charisma of her new lover. And the third is Richard, a tall, shy Englishman who is in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone.

When Olanna witnesses deeds of unimaginable horror in the outbreak of war, all of these characters are propelled into events that will putt them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another. This extraordinary novel is about Africa itself; about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism: about ethnic allegiances; about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

There have been several books by Nigerian authors that I have been tempted to read over the years including the debut novel by this author, called Purple Hibiscus, but I had never managed to get around to it! So, when I decided to read the long list nominees for the Orange Prize, this was the first book that I requested. And then Kailana and I were chatting about what books we shared on our TBR piles and we decided to buddy read this one!

For me, a big part of the reason for my interest in Nigerian literature is that my ex is half Nigerian and was raised in Lagos from the time he was 3 months old, and lived there until he was about 28. Whilst I wouldn't necessarily say that my relationship with him necessarily exposed me to the best parts of Nigerian culture, (I mainly got to meet his friends - all young men between the ages of 20 to 30, and for the most part they were interested in partying), the fact of the matter is that my son has a Nigerian-St Dominique-Australian heritage, and so a lot of the time I feel like I should be doing more to ensure that he understands his heritage. Right from the time my son was born, I was the one trying to push the ex into sharing language, heritage...even that there were other kids like him with a similar mixed heritage. Unfortunately, the ex never really got on board with this, and these days he doesn't even phone very often to say hello let alone to talk about anything like this. All that is a very long winded way for me to say that in some ways I feel a connection to the subject of this novel....without ever actually having been to Nigeria, or really having much interest in going to visit!! Of course, he is Yoruba, so the characters of this book would quite possibly be horrified at my idea of this sense of connection!

This book is separated into four parts. The first part is set in the early 1960's, the second in the late 1960's, with the pattern repeated for the third and fourth parts. In the first part, we meet our protagonists. Firstly we meet Ugwu, the shy young village boy who has come to the university town of Nsukka to become houseboy to the idealistic university professor Odenigbo. Then we meet Olanna, the daughter of a wealthy but, ultimately, corrupt Igbo businessman, who has decided to move in with Odenigbo, and there is Richard, who is in love with Olanna's twin sister Kainene. The early parts of the novel are filled with the zealousness of the intellectuals who want to see the Igbo tribes have a land of their own, full of the promise and the excitement of such a venture. And then in part 2 (set in 1967) we see the beginning of the war.

Not only have events changed the direction of the country of Nigeria, but within the personal lives of the characters much has changed. Ugwu is still houseboy, but he has now been educated and finds himself in the end helping assuming many roles - houseboy, babysitter, friend, confidante and even teacher in some parts of the book. Richard finds himself in the somewhat strange position of being a white man who speaks fluent Igbo and becomes involved in the war propaganda machine. However many of the key relationships in the book are now fractured, and it is only as the narrative returns once again to the early 1960s that we find out what caused those divides.

As the war continues on, we see many things through the eyes of the characters - death, destruction, rape, massacres - and the author does a fine job of giving just enough information to haunt the reader without being too overbearing with the details.

The other area where she has excelled is in showing the dichotomy of the situation in Nigeria at that time - the colonials had withdrawn to let the country men rule themselves but there were such levels of greed, mistrust and corruption that trouble was inevitable. The ethnic divides were just so strong particularly after some of the minority Igbo staged a coup, and then there were retaliatory massacres. And yet, as individuals there were friendships with people from other tribes that were able to survive all the violence - perhaps damaged, but still somewhat intact.

The double standards were not only in terms of the problems facing the nation as a whole. I remember thinking it quite ironic that even within the personal standards of the characters there was the hypocrisy. For example, at the first sign of trouble, Olanna's parents flee Nigeria to live in relative luxury in London, and return only when the trouble is over,and this happens more than once and for another small example. At one point Odenigbo is driving to Ugwu's home village:

The ride to his village was mostly silent. As they drove past some farms with rows and rows of corn and cassava like a neatly plaited hairstyle, Master said, "See? This is what our government should focus on. If we learn irrigation technology, we can feed this country easily. We can overcome this colonial dependence on imports."

And yet on arrival at his village he is offered pineapple:

Chioke shook Master's hands with both of hers. "Thank you, master. Deje!" She ran back inside and emerged with a small pineapple that she pressed into Master's hand.

"No, no," Master said, pushing the pineapple back. "Local pineapples are too acidic, they burn my mouth."

As we get to the last quarter of the book, the war is in full swing. Even those who are wealthy are feeling the effects of the blockades imposed by the Nigerian army, and the world looks on as millions starve, as innocent people are killed. And as the situation worsens our characters are bought together again, but not before the war claims parts of their soul, and perhaps more, forever.

Many of the details in this book were fascinating. It is not an easy to read book, and nor would I say it was something that you enjoy in a light and accessible way. It is a book to savour and to contemplate as you read. I will definitely be reading more from this author.

Rating 4/5

Other Bloggers reviews:

My Own Little Reading Room
Passion for the Page
Trish's Reading Nook
Literarily