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Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Gray Blue

Why do I keep trying Doris Lessing? I'm in the mood to reread things I haven't read for years, but she  feels like a gunmetal bulkhead.
I gave up on The Golden Notebook about one-third of the way through.

The only thing I remember liking was her collection of essays on her return to Zimbabwe, where she'd grown up (then Southern Rhodesia), after years of exile, African Laughter: four visits to Zimbabwe.
Maybe I'll try that again.

I was interested to see she donated her personal library to the city library in Harare, Zimbabwe. Nice blue wall, eh?

In her Nobel Lecture, she talked about the hunger for books that she saw when she went back to Zimbabwe in the 1980s (and things have not improved since):
As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop in shyly, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.

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