Africa is a Country

I read a lot of bad books this year. But for the good ones, the best book of 2008 is undoubtedly Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. As one reviewer described it: ‘It reads like an oral history delivered by a stoop-dwelling bard — one who is creative with language, clear in reference and rarely speak.” Then there’s Barack Obama’s memoir he wrote while in law school, Dreams of My Father. That’s because he can write.  I also enjoyed Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (a story about what happens to South Africans who played white under Apartheid), J M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.  Then there was Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma, about a child soldier in Liberia and Sierra Leone (first published in French in 2000, and translated into English in 2005), journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ ode to his childhood in Baltimore, his unconventional father and hip hop in The Beautiful Life: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.