It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

Last Week

Exciting things were happening last weekend! Perhaps, if you’re on twitter, you noticed w had some great conversations going on under the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag. It was wonderful to meet so many non-white, queer, non-Western and differently-abled bloggers and talk about what we want out of diversity in blogging and publishing! Check out the complete storify here.

“A conversation between @demelzagriff95 and @_diversebooks resulted in the creation of the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag. Since May 17, the hashtag has exploded, resulting in more than 1,000 tweets from a wide variety of bloggers and Twitter users. This is just the beginning of the hashtag’s impact.”

I also finished two reads I’d been making my way through quite slowly, I don’t have a long commute at the moment and in my case that means audiobooks take ages.

We Need New Names was such a great read though I would have preferred to read it instead of listening to it, to follow the story better. I read this one for my reading more African lit challenge, though this is my second Zimbabwean novels, I need to branch out.

Obesity.The Biography is my second book from the autobiography of illness series, which is wonderful so far. Gilman’s work is usually amazing, but I would have liked a more in-depth discussion. Might try Gilman’s Fat.A Cultural History though.

My favorite read last week was Anne Chebu’s Anleitung zum Schwarz sein /Instrutions for Being Black, an introduction about racism experienced by Afro-Germans for Afro-Germans and it should be a good learning experience for white Germans. I fall somewhere in the middle and could relate so much, it was wonderful to find such a book for the German context. Sadly there seems to exist no translation, but if you speak German, definitely read this book!

I also got some blogging done, posting a reading list for International Day Against homophobia and posted another instalment of my 5 On a Theme series, this time on Chicana and Latino/a Speculative Fiction.

Currently

I’m still trying so hard not to get distracted by shiny new books because I’m starting exam prep and will be reading Chicana literature and secondary lit in June. Don’t distract me with awesome blog posts about amazing books! ;D But you’re all welcome to join me in my reading!

What are you all reading? Let me know in the comments!

Thoughts: The Hairdresser of Harare

The hairdresser of Harare is Vimbai, the best in Mrs. Khumalo’s salon. Vimbai is unmarried with a young daughter, but with a place in a good neighborhood, a house help and her job, things are going well and her talent draws customers to the salon. That is until another hairdresser, the smooth-talking Dumisani starts at Mrs. Khumalo’s salon. Initially theratening her job security and losing Vimbai her role of queen bee, she loathes Dumisani, but slowly the start becoming friends and when Dumisani needs a place to stay, Vimbai becomes his landlady.

Huchu’s first novel is set in post-apartheid Zimbabwe during mounting economic problems and a 90% unemloyment rate. Vimbai and the other women in the salon are trading petrol and sugar and there are problems with white farmers trying to hang onto their farms after independence while government officials are seizing the property. These issues are very much present but the “issue” focus of The Hairdresser is on homosexuality, its illegality and views of gay men as “lower than pigs and dogs.”

I very much enjoy characters that are not easily likeable and Vimbai with her pride and some terrible mistakes is a complex character and it is great to see her grow and become more aware. Her views will often be hard to take but the author shows where she is coming from and presents the difficulty women like Vimbai experience at the hands of men.

While Vimbai and Dumisani become closer and Vimbai is enthusiastically embraced by his family, as readers we can see where their thoughts on their future diverge. Dumisani brings larger issues into Vimbai’s life and from there things begin to unravel. I feel that perhaps the ending could have benefitted from a few more pages, it is a bit sudden but perhaps the salon life and little power struggles between the hairdressers in the first half of the book were just that well-written. The novel has been described as “bittersweet,” and this is a fitting term, so enjoy this one but be prepared for some bitterness.

This is a difficult one to write about without spoiling too much! I hope you’ll give the book a try, I know I’ll look out for Tendai Huchu’s future works! I chose The Hairdresser of Harare for Kinna’s Africa Reading Challenge and I think it might actually be the first book set in Zimbabwe and also written by a Zimbabwean author that I’ve read. But I do have another one, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, on my list.

Other thoughts:

Reading on a Rainy Day

Have you read this book? Let me know and I’ll add a link!