Author : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Narrators : January LaVoy
Genre : Non-fiction
Publisher : Random House Audio
Listening Length : 1 hour 1 minute
Rating : 5/5
Narrator Rating : 5/5
“Dear Ijeawele” is a Adichie’s letter to a friend with suggestions on how to raise a feminist daughter. In her 15 suggestions Adichie explores many topics and speaks truths in a simple and straightforward way. It is true I realize now, that you might believe something inside your head, but to have it spoken aloud is to give it strength. Adichie does just that. She speaks of truths which should really be common sense but aren’t; we are led away from them in the name of tradition, or not rocking the boat, or just keeping the peace.
To say that I loved this book is an understatement. The author’s wise words are beautifully narrated by LaVoy. I have listened to this audiobook multiple times and highly recommend you do too. Here are a few choice quotes from “A Feminist Manifesto in 15 Suggestions”:
“People will selectively use “tradition” to justify anything.”
“Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”
“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.”
“Why were we raised to speak in low tones about periods? To be filled with shame if our menstrual blood happened to stain our skirt? Periods are nothing to be ashamed of. Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist. I remember a man who said a period was like shit. Well, sacred shit, I told him, because you wouldn’t be here if periods didn’t happen.”
“Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement. We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other.”
“If the justification for controlling women’s bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was ‘women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.’ Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be ‘covered up’ to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men.”
“We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.”
Title : Skinny Dip
Title : All Creatures Great and Small
The books are also very well-written. Descriptions are detailed, so in my mind’s eye I can picture the green moors, the ruddy cows and the squealing pigs. It also helps that I have seen the BBC adaptation, and that this book is read so beautifully by Christopher Timothy, the actor who played James Herriot in them.
Finding a dependable author is hard. Finding a dependable author with a book series, who delivers the goods with every book, is harder! There is so much hype these days with every blogger, every writer with an opinion recommending books. It has gotten very difficult separating the wheat from the chaff. So when I can get my hands on a book of “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series, I consider myself very lucky. Author Alexander McCall Smith is fabulous, and although he writes quite a bit (and multiple series too!) each book is a work of quality. Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist, or lead detective in all these books is one of 
I recently read Books 14, 15, 16 and 17 of the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” Series. In each book Mma Ramotswe tackles slightly different problems with logic, patience and good humor. In #14 “The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon” she must figure out why a new beauty salon is getting a bad reputation from the get-go, while in #15 “The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café” she must suss out the identity of a mysterious Indian woman, and help her assistant Grace Makutsi solve restaurant-running problems. In #16 “The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine” Mma Ramotswe, persuaded by the indefatigable Mma Makutsi decides to take a holiday, but a sensitive case comes in and she isn’t sure if Mma Makutsi is up to the task. In #17 “Precious and Grace” both the ladies of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency must handle a case and judge whether some things are better left in the past.
Each of these books is delightful, and seeing that I’ve read books of these series after quite a while, I savored each one. The beauty of these books and this series comes not just from the interesting cases that come through, but from the wisdom, compassion and good old common sense that flow from Mma Ramotswe’s lips and actions. These books are very different from typical who-dun-it mysteries, like Agatha Christie’s (also an author I adore) for example, because the mysteries themselves rarely involve murder/violence. The issues to be resolved revolve around human behavior, and Mma Ramotswe as detective-in-chief must handle each one with wit and grace.
