Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, would like to see fellow author, Lola Shoneyin’s ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives’ adapted for screen as a tragicomedy mini-series.
Adichie recently featured in New York Times’ “By The Book”, an interview series that explores the intimate lives of authors as readers of other works. She also mentioned that Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories in “Interpreter of Maladies” and ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” would make powerful and lovely screen adaptations.
The ‘Americanah’ author also discussed the kind of books she keeps on her nightstand, naming ‘One Day I Will Write About This Place’ as her favourite.
“One Day I Will Write About This Place by the late Binyavanga Wainaina, a great prose stylist and one of my closest friends in the world, is kept always on my bedside because I miss him desperately,” she said.
Others include: The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta by Kenneth Dike, Some of My Best Friends by Emily Bernard, and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé, among others.
Describing her ideal reading experience the author revealed that she loves to read in bed, curled up and comfortable, usually early in the morning or late at night, with quiet in the air and her iPad or a book propped on a pillow.
Adichie whose bookshelf boasts of several genres of books unrestricted to a particular region said that she loves to read poetry while working on fiction “as a way of immersing myself in language, of luring back my own words.”
“I try not to read novels that are similar to whatever I’m working on, but I do reread novels I love, like Chinua Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’, to remind myself of what fiction can do,” she added.
The celebrated author named Buchi Emecheta’s ‘The Joys of Motherhood’ as one of the last great books she “recently re-read, and was struck by its quiet power and accomplishment.”
She spoke extensively on other issues such as how a great book can be badly written; her most admired critics, journalists, playwrights, journalists, poets; her favourite hero/heroine and villain/anti-hero.