Michiko Kakutani - Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO The New York Times for permission to reprint portions or adaptations of previously published material:

For Muhammad Ali, an Endless Round of Books, June 23, 2016, including Muhammad Ali: The Tribute, 19422016, by Sports Illustrated, The Fight by Norman Mailer, King of the World by David Remnick, The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Lifes Journey by Muhammad Ali with Hana Yasmeen Ali, The Muhammad Ali Reader, edited by Gerald Early; For Writers, Father and Son, Out of Conflict Grew Love, May 23, 2000, Experience: A Memoir by Martin Amis; Stories of Wonder, Fear and Kindness from the Moth, April 3, 2017, The Moth Presents All These Wonders. True Stories About Facing the Unknown, edited by Catherine Burns; A Nations Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible, April 29, 2012, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro; Confronting the Inevitable, Graphically, May 5, 2014, Cant We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast; Elena Ferrantes The Story of the Lost Child, the Finale in a Quartet, September 3, 2015, The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante; What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future, March 19, 2012, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner; Listening for Clues to Minds Mysteries, July 8, 2013, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz; Hope Jahrens Road Map to the Secret Life of Plants, March 28, 2016, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren; And When She Was Bad She Was March 7, 2002, Atonement by Ian McEwan; First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein and Loss, August 27, 2009, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore; Trevor Noahs Raw Account of Life Under Apartheid, November 28, 2016, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah; A Writing Stone: Chapter and Verse, October 25, 2010, Life by Keith Richards with James Fox; Quirky, Sassy and Wise in a London of Exiles, April 25, 2000, White Teeth by Zadie Smith; The Bronx, the Bench and the Life in Between, January 21, 2013, My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor; Underground Railroad Lays Bare Horrors of Slavery and its Toxic Legacy, August 2, 2016, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

Reprinted by permission of The New York Times Company.

MICHIKO KAKUTANI, the former chief book critic of The New York Times, is the author of the bestseller The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

AMERICANAH

(2013)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a wonderfully touching, incisive, and very funny coming-of-age tale thats both an old-fashioned love story and a sharp-eyed meditation on race, class, immigration, and identity in our rapidly changing, globalized world.

Adichies spirited and outspoken heroine, Ifemelu, grows up in Lagos, Nigeria, where she falls in love, in high school, with Obinze, the earnest and quietly charming son of a literature professor. The two have instant chemistryshe realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinzeand picture a future together, possibly in America, a country Obinze reveres.

When teacher strikes interrupt their college lives and Ifemelu receives a scholarship to attend university in America, Obinze urges her to take it. He tells her that he will get a visa and follow her there as soon as he completes his college degree, but harsh post-9/11 immigration policies will prevent this from happening. He will instead spend several miserable years as an illegal immigrant in London, where he is unable to find any but the most menial jobs. Eventually, he returns to Lagos, where he becomes a successful property developer, marries, and has a child.

Ifemelu, meanwhile, struggles to adapt to life in America. She compares what she sees firsthand with memories of Cosby Show episodes she watched growing up. And she hungers to understand everything about Americato support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports lockouts meant, order a muffin without thinking that it really was cake. Back home, she hadnt really thought of herself as black, and shes startled by how ubiquitous arguments about race are in the United States, permeating everything from romances to friendships to on-the-job dynamics. In a blog post addressed to Fellow Non-American Blacks, she writes, Stop arguing. Stop saying Im Jamaican or Im Ghanaian. America doesnt care. So what if you werent black in your country? Youre in America now.

Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelus experiences with extraordinary immediacy.

Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelus experiences with extraordinary immediacy while satirizing both the casual racism of some Americans and the sanctimony of those progressives eager to wear their liberal politics like a badge.

As a foreigner, Ifemelu notices the myriad oddities of American culture with wry humor. She notices that Americans tend to stand around and drink at parties, instead of dancing; that many wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall to send the message that they are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother looking nice. She notices that they call arithmetic math, not maths, and that academic types can get bizarrely incensed over matters like imported vegetables that ripened in trucks.

As the years scroll by, Ifemelu achieves success with her blog called Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America. She is confident in a way she hadnt been before, and after a breakup with a wealthy white businessman she settles into a perfect-on-paper relationship with a black professor who teaches at Yale.

But Ifemelu cannot stop thinking about Obinze, her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. And she realizes that the cement in her soul that she often feels is a kind of homesicknessfor Lagos and her family. And so, after thirteen years, she decides to return homea journey that proves as jarring as her voyage to America. Her experiences, so powerfully recounted by Adichie, become a story about belonging and not-belonging in a world where identities are both increasingly fluid and defining, a story about how we are shaped by the places where we grew up and the places where we come to live.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

A Memoir

(2015)

Elizabeth Alexander

In this haunting memoir about love and loss and grief, Elizabeth Alexander describes the shattering emotional aftermath of the death of her beloved husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and how she and her two sons, Solomon and Simon, consoled one another and guided one another through a dark corridor of sorrow and back out into the light.