Long Walk Through Africa
When I moved a few months ago, I was in the middle of slowly reading another freakin’ Dave Eggers book, What is the What. NYT book of the year or whatever, yada yada; of course I can’t get enough of the guy just like everybody else on earth. This one was a little different though. A coming of age story about an African refugee? What? You can read better descriptions on Amazon than I could write, but the gist is that the main character was displaced by civil war at a very young age and after 13 years of refugee camps and death and struggle and long, long walks, he gets a chance to come struggle in the US. (note: that isn’t a summary of the first chapter - that’s a summary of the whole book.)
90% of the readers of this book would probably be kidding themselves if they think they’d have read the book if Papa E didn’t write it, myself included. If you look over my bookshelves, the only books of strife and struggle that you see either take place in space, or involve educated white men. Or vampires. Space vampires. In that alone, I see enough reason to be impressed with the book.
So anyway, a few months pass and I realize that I stopped reading the book when I went through my own incredible struggle and displacement (moving out into the suburbs.) Last week, I picked it up again and finished it. Overall, it made me sad and embarrassed with myself. Stack this on top of a few movies about people Doing the Right Thing, and you could say I’ve had an impression left on me.
Either way, gotta love e-diddy.