Reading Material

Living in Kenya I now have plenty of time for recreational reading. One of the challenges is finding interesting reading material. Fortunately, living in a larger centre I have access to a fair amount of material, but the selection isn’t what one would hope.

My two sources have been the Kisumu Public Library the college (TICH) library. Both are larger and have more material than I would have guessed. There is plenty of technical reading and I’ve even come across finance and economics textbooks from my university days. There is a mixed bag of novels and an assortment of the obscure and trivial. I’ve seen a 1998 Nairobi phone book, a 1970s era Statistics Canada report, and a tourist guide to U.S. guest houses and bed & breakfasts (five copies, in fact). The libraries are so desperate for material that they will stack everything and anything. You can’t blame them, but you do have to wonder what people were thinking when they sent some of this material to Africa.

So far I’ve been reading mostly biographies. I started on a mammoth one on Lord Beaverbrook and have also read books on Cecil Rhodes and Ring Landner. I’m presently working my way through the 1970s Jeremy Thorpe murder trial. An interesting aspect relating to the Rhodes book was noting the check-out history from the Kisumu library. The book has been taken out 12 times beginning on September 22,1971, and I was the first person to do so since 1988.