I remember the very first time I held a book in my hands. Ok, that’s a lie. I remember my mother telling me. I was about four years old and my father bought me a copy of Dick Whittington. Back in 1998, we lived in a high-class low-income neighborhood in a place in Kiambu. The walls in the house were a chalky ugly blue that I defaced with pens. I had a writing on the wall phase. Soon after, Father found a more effective way to get me to stop writing on the walls: a blackboard and Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I read most of it on his lap every day after he came home from work. Noises from the estate accompanied his voice My mother in the kitchen as she banged the edges of the sufuria with her mwiko while sautéing onions. Kids shrieking and laughing outside as their parents bellowed for them to get back home.
Two years later Father bought me one of his favourite books. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. I felt really grown up because I was finally ready for novels. At least according to my father. In reality, I wasn’t. In addition to being too young and unsophisticated for Twain, I couldn’t concentrate long enough on the book. That didn’t stop me from mindlessly sailing through it. Father bought me Huck Finn once I’d “finished” Sawyer. What’s a girl to do when her father won’t stop buying her classics she’s not ready for? You guessed it, nothing.

Eventually, I accumulated a sizeable collection of classics from Dickens’ David Copperfield to Alfu Lela Ulela (Swahili version of 1001 Arabian Nights). However, it got better- and easier for me. In 2001, Father and I had gone on a shopping trip to Ukay mall (RIP) and on its ground floor was a Books First. Before it was a sad pile of books in supermarkets, it was a coffe shop and a bookshop. That day was especially pivotal because a) I saw waffles for the first time and b) Father finally agreed to let me read something more suited to my reading level: R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps. This was followed by a huge haul of all the Goosebumps books I could find. After transferring two more schools, I was introduced to Animorphs by K.A. Applegate in 2004.
And then came Charmed and Angel (the ones that were TV shows) but perhaps the moment I enjoy the most was when I read Across the Bridge by Mwangi Gicheru. Many teachers were scandalized by a preteen reading such an adult-themed book but considering the airport paperbacks by Dan Brown and John Grisham I was reading back home; I couldn’t understand where they were coming from. In 2006 I was “banned” from watching television. I also came very close to having novels banned because I was “reading too much”. Is there such a thing?
By the time I was joining high school I thought I knew the best airport paperbacks. Until Sidney Sheldon utajua haujui’d me. The very first Sheldon I read was The Stars Shine Down. I was in drama club at the time, it was the year 2008. After reading that book, I was blown away by how fast I devoured it. I was always a fast reader, racing with classmates back in high school who could finish a novel quicker. But in high school I got even more neurotic. Crazy right? Not so much.
In any case, did you really high school in Kenya if you didn’t read the Texas!

Tyler Family Saga series or follow the melodramatic lives of the Santangelo family? How can you even call yourself a reader if you never at least once took up a Mills and Boone or a Harlequin? And if you were a bit edgier, Harlequin Suspense. Forget being a Twihard, the ultimate teen experience for us real millennials was being a trashy romance addict.
2008 didn’t really cement itself until I met and fell in love with one of the greatest book series ever written. Which book would it be? Harry Potter, duh! I could never really afford copies of the book so I often had to beg owners to let me read their books. I don’t even know why I say I don’t have sales experience considering how much self-promotion I had to do to get the owners to share the books.
Of course, I can’t mention high school without mentioning a class of books that propelled majority of the reading population through the incessant boredom of school. PACESETTERS. These little novellas had some of the most compelling stories I’ve ever read. And honestly, majority of them had better storylines than Hollywood’s whitest blockbusters. The Pacesetter I recall the most vividly was an infidelity drama called Forgive Me, Josephine.

The rest of high school flew by via weight gain and novels. I also slept a lot because in retrospect I was very depressed. Additionally, I got to discover authors to avoid like Danielle Steele. I also found the pioneer of modern historical bodice rippers, Kathleen Woodiwiss. She is the one who started the movement that led us to Fabio-covered soft porn. An icon, I stan.

After high school and through college, I discovered queen of mysteries Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes stories. For my 20th birthday, my father bought me a collection of articles by Jeremy Clarkson which later led to my very first blog, Nairobi Pedestrian.
In 2014, drama unfolded due to the upcoming release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie adaptation. I just had to know what the hell everyone was melting down about. When looking up the book online I discovered the facebook for book lovers, Goodreads (where I ended up making some lifelong friends and forming a book club). It was there I discovered the wonderful world of queer fiction. I fell in love with wonderful books like Simon v The Homo Sapiens Agenda- which is still one of my favourite books to this day. (This is still my most popular review on GR).
Post-college, the only pivotal moments were my first published article, a review of Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne. And Jeffrey Archer’s collections of short stories, which inspired me to write my first novel which was rejected- soundly- by publishers.
I am currently reading The Elegance of The Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and it is the first in a new phase of stream-of-consciousness literary fiction. I can’t wait to see where this goes…
