Becoming The Muse

The Best Book I Read This Year….. and the award goes to:

This year I read more books than my usual average, it may have had something to do with the electricity downtime leaving me with lots of hours to binge on books, so I cant just settle for one book…

If you are on GoodReads.… pop by and add me as a friend for a comprehensive list of my reading list
Note: I am a big fan of epic high fantasy.

Books by people from my circles which I quite enjoyed immensely this year:

Sisyphean Mind Anthology by Ibrahim Oga

Sisyphean Mind is a vignette of 12 everyday flash fiction stories that are meant to inspire an against all odds mentality, to never abandon a seemingly futile task, to keep on keeping on. Full review below

Iscariot by Chiseche

Iscariot is a poetry chapbook by Chiseche, dedicated to all the broken things and stitched together with short poems, together which makeup the fabric of one elusive tale…. Full review below

Chiseche then wrote a review which led me to another chapbook

Yellow by LadyInk

Yellow is a diary of a love affair that lasts only 163 days….Fair Warning: this 30 minute read of bite-sized poetic musings will violently rip off the Band-Aid from your heart and you may need a support club afterwards…. Check out my more detailed review below

This is the year I also discovered Nigerian storyteller Okey Ndibe and his books Arrows Of Rain and Foreign Gods Inc

Although Arrows of Rain was first released almost 20 years I only “found” it this year and the story told in this book was a familiar one, even though its set in a fictitious republic, Okey Ndibe uses fiction to tell the truth……

One of the messages that deeply resonated with me from this story was the following

Remember this: a story never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth’s debt to a story -Okey Ndibe

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And for that fantasy fix Okey Ndibe’s book Foreign Gods Inc. in a weird way made me think of Neil Gaiman‘s book American Gods in a story you would have to read to believe, touching on religion and intertwined with Africa’s colonial history, it’s a provocatively profound read…..

…. And of course the most epic high fantasy book I read was Samantha Shannon’s The Priory Of Orange Tree… This 800+ paged tome has got to take the award of the most paged book I read this year and I loved every single page of it….

The Priory Of Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

MusamboTheMuse recommended this book after I asked on twitter if anyone had suggestions for a fantasy book. I was so sad to come to the end of the book that after I finished it I was on a book hangover, not wanting to read another book ever again because none could hold my attention the way Samantha’s book did; but I am sober now… catch my more detailed review below

These are  books that stood out for me this year…. What fiction books have you been reading?

~B

current status: Book Hungover
after finishing @say_shannon 's epic TPOTOT cannot start another book because I have been thoroughly immersed in the worlds East, West and of course a little to the South.

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) September 24, 2019