The Reading List

by Sara Nisha Adams

Sometimes, books just take us away for a little while, and return us to our place with a new perspective.

The book had made him think of it, how out of place he felt in Wembley when he first arrived, how everyone looked at him and his family differently for a while, forever. “I moved here from Kenya, you see. With my wife and our little girls. We wanted to start a brand-new life here—we had family here, always talking about all the opportunities, the jobs. But when I got here, it just felt lonely. I wondered why people were so unkind to me. I thought to myself, why didn’t they know who I was, that I was just like them? No matter what I did, what I said, no one even tried to understand me. Some of our neighbors were really lovely—but other than that, everyone else saw us as just different from them, impossible to understand. So they didn’t even try.

Ba always told me that sometimes when you really like a book, you need to read it again! To relive what you loved and find out what you missed before. Books always change as the person who reads them changes too. That’s what Ba said.”