The Books Writers Read and Disagreed With

There are many reasons why one may disagree with a piece of writing. It could be the character development, the character arc, how the writer responds to occurrences and events as the book progresses, or the arguments that the author decides to highlight and champion. All of these show that reading is an exercise. While you can learn something new, or escape from the world, you can also choose to disagree with whatever text you are engaging with. Hence, I find it interesting to read the responses in our First Draft interview column to this question: ‘What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?’

In the past few months, we have received some interesting responses to this question. From South African historian, Thula Simpson, to Nigerian writer, Helon Habila, here are seven writers and the books they read and disagreed with.

One can disagree with a text for many reasons, for style, for theme, for content, for its argument, and still find something in it to like. I am a more tolerant reader than I used to be, I guess. I read books sometimes because I was commissioned to review them, and in that case, I make my position clear—I did that recently in my review of Dear Senturan by Akweke Emezie for the UK Guardian. I love the writing style, Emezi is a brilliant stylist, but I was turned off by the narcissism.

It would have to be How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. The story is about a fictional village in West Africa, Kosawa, struggling to protect itself from an extractivist corporation. This corporation is drilling oil, destroying the surrounding land, and killing Kosawa’s children, culture and the way its people relate with one another. It is a heartbreaking and deeply moving story of slow death facilitated by capitalist accumulation and told through the perspectives of various community members who witness and experience the effects of this destruction. I learned and felt a lot as I read this book.

However, I winced at the idea that the protagonist’s coming of age as an organizer and activist was only made possible by her emigration to the US and her encounter with what the writer situated as ‘real democracy’. Additionally, while Mbue highlighted that in part, it was a series of failures in the US that led to the African community’s dispossession, she did not make it clear that it was systems of imperialism, racial capitalism, and extraction—systems that are central to the US’s brand of liberal democracy and global dominance—that made it possible for that community to be decimated in the way that it was. This omission—not naming the harm this caused as a product of imperialism and capitalism is what allowed the author to situate the US as a model democracy and even a beacon of hope—when in this and many other stories it is the source of destruction.