Recent Reads

From the wonderful Rockport Public Library: Nicholas Drayson's A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

I'm taking the liberty of putting this book down halfway though and declaring it a miniature gem!  

How could you not love a story where, on page 2, our protagonist is reminiscing about his first Sports Day (circa 1959) in which he is party to a very dramatic mishap involving a cricket ball in his hand being grabbed by a black kite but in a self deprecatory way goes on to say, "Of course it wasn't quite accurate that he had no memories of the javelin throwing. Few would forget the incident with the Governor General's wife's corgi."

This is a gentle book in which gentle humor is mined from the deeply personal lives of characters gallantly trying to continue a courteous and polite society within a greater reality that is not by any means always gentle.

Mr. Drayson, in my view, takes some liberties with the language spoken by characters.  By language I mean as in English, Swahili, Hindi, Gujurati etc.  I have friends who hail from Kenya who whilst speaking perfect English to me, immediately lapse into Hindi (or Hinglish) when chatting among themselves. Mr. Drayson's Kenyan Asian characters continually speak and think in an English frozen in time and place, the same time and place that P.G. Wodehouse uses in a great many of his stories!   However, it is the prerogative of the writer to take such liberties, thank goodness, as without them it would be a far less charming book.

Part of the joy of reading is to skip from one genre to another and appreciate each one because of the sheer variety of writing styles and formats that are so available to us, thanks to such institutions as the Rockport Public Library which incidentally has the most amazing calendar of events within and without the library's four walls.