emma's Reviews > Americanah

I, like any self-respecting bookworm, am a big fan of a bookstore.

Left to my own devices for a few hours, I will often find my way to one, usually an old favorite but sometimes a new one to try.

https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...

And once I am there, I will stay there for a very long time.

When I found this book, it was in the literary fiction section of a bookstore basement, where the used books were kept in winding rows.

Another thing about me: I keep a wish-list of books I mean to buy. When I want to buy one that isn’t on that list, I achieve a Bare Minimum Requirement of reading a few pages and seeing if I feel ordained to keep going. (I almost always do.)

So in this bookstore basement, on a Thursday night around 9:30 or 10 pm (yes, I know this is late. The coolest bookstores are open late), I found a chair in a corner under an unseemly pipe, plunked myself down, and started reading.

Over the next hour, a series of quirky college students had loud and performative first dates in a cycle so coordinated it was as if they scheduled it. First two girls yelled about how one of them had seen Panic! at the Disco at a rural gas station. Then a boy and a girl did an intentionally adorable thing where they pointed out the title of a book and tried to guess the plot (this was the girl’s idea, and the boy’s interest was never more than half-hearted). Then two older women shouted across the shelves about where the children’s section was before learning the answer: right f*cking in front of them.

That last one may not have been a date, but I promise it was equally annoying.

Through it all, I sat and read this book.

It wasn’t even a comfy chair, or a particularly pleasant room. It was just that good of a book.

My favorite TED talk (which is a very low bar) has been Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” since I watched it in a gender class a few years ago. In it, Adichie explains the pervasiveness of stereotypes and bigotry when only one story about a certain group is being told - she uses the story of Africa being a continent of poverty without technology, the only one told in America, as an example.

After I watched that talk in that class, and after I got home and watched it again, I should have gone right out and bought everything she’d ever written. But I didn’t. What a dummy.

This book is divine.

It is so, so beautifully written. I care about each and every character in a way that hurts my heart. It’s nearly 600 pages long, and character-driven to the point that there’s essentially no plot other than the daily progression of our protagonists’ lives, but if it were twice as long as I wouldn’t have minded.

It’s just that good.

I feel like it expanded my whole brain.

Everyone should get to have that feeling.

Bottom line: Everyone should read this book.

------------
pre-review

i missed reading this the second i finished it.

review to come / 5 stars

------------
currently-reading updates

could someone please inform the work i'm supposed to be doing that i won't be doing it due to suddenly being unable to put this down? k thanks

------------
tbr review

the best way to stay on track on your reading challenge is to read three books at once and also one of those books is 600 pages long