While there’s a range of ereaders on the market, there’s no arguing that the Kindle has taken the top spot in terms of popularity. But narrowing down your ereader purchasing to a Kindle is only the first step. After that, there’s the crucial question of which Kindle model to get. Two of the most well-loved Kindle models are the Paperwhite and the Oasis. They both have similar sized screens and share a lot of features. So, the Kindle Oasis vs. Paperwhite: which one should you get?

First, a little bit of history. The Kindle Paperwhite came out in 2012, and its latest generation/update was in 2021. The Kindle Oasis came out in 2016, and its latest generation/update was in 2019. I will be comparing the most recent generations of both, though because the Oasis has not been updated in three years, it will likely either see a new generation in the next year or so or be officially discontinued.

The Republic of Kenya is the 29th most populous country in the world, home to more than 47,600,000 people, and the third largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has an incredibly rich history, tracing primate habitation for more than 20 million years. Its borders encompass major cities of Nairobi, the current capital, founded by colonialists in 1899; Mombasa, the original capital, founded by Kenyans in 900 CE; and Kisumu, one of the oldest settlements in Kenya and located on Lake Victoria.

The country was invaded by Omani Arabs in the 17th century, who then established a slave trade with Portuguese colonialists. In the 1880s, Germany established Kenya as a protectorate (a deeply colonialist word), calling the whole country the “East Africa Protectorate,” which was transferred to the British in 1890. It was renamed Kenya in 1920; from 1952 to 1959, the Mau Mau people in Kenya fought a rebellion to release the country from British rule. On December 12, 1964, the Republic of Kenya was officially established and functions today as an independent democratic republic, although it is still considered part of the British Commonwealth.

With such a deep history and so many diverse voices — both African and not — in its history, it is no surprise that Kenya’s literature is equally multifaceted and beautiful. I’ve gathered ten books about Kenya here from Kenyan authors, based on recommendations from Kenyan readers and bloggers.

The Best Books About Kenya

If you grew up within the bounds of Western civilization, chances are you’ve heard of Mother Goose in one form or another. Maybe she was the charming and comforting old woman on the cover of the book your parents read to you at bedtime, or maybe she was an actual goose. Whatever the case, the nickname Mother Goose has been synonymous with childlike nursery rhymes and fairytales for centuries, but her true origin is up for debate.

Although she only came into prominence in Europe and North America between the 17th and 19th centuries, Mother Goose’s origins date back to as early as the 8th century CE. Betrada II of Laon, mother of Charlemagne (AKA Charles the Great, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), spent frequent time in children’s company telling them folk and fairytales.

Her most common nicknames were “Queen Goosefoot” or “Goose-foot Bertha,” as she suffered from a malformation of one of her feet. Some accounts suggest that it was Robert II of France’s wife who was Queen Goosefoot, as her name was also Bertha and her common nickname was “Bertha the Spinner” — referring to someone known for “spinning” fantastic tales that enthralled children. Another theory is that the original Mother Goose was the Queen of Sheba, who was known for having a “strange foot” that resembled that of a goose or swan.

Meanwhile, in France by the time of the mid-17th century, nicknames such as “Mère L’Oye” or “Mère Oye” — roughly translated to Mother Goose — were used as descriptors of women of a certain age who enjoyed delighting children with fairy and folktales. It was Charles Perrault who, in 1697, published his revered and largely influential collection of stories Histoires ou contes du temps passé often supplemented with the subtitle Contes de ma mère l’Oye.

English European readers, however, were already familiar with their own iteration of Mother Goose by the 17th century in the form of Old Mother Hubbard, a nursery rhyme by English poet, Edmund Spenser, first published around 1590. In the 1690s, as Perrault was gearing up to release his own goose into the wild, Madame d’Aulnoy — a French author of literary fairytales — began publishing collections under the pseudonym Mother Bunch, a figure similar to that of Mother Goose.

If you’re looking to read more books from around the world, beginning with novellas in translation makes a lot of sense. For reasons I don’t fully understand, a lot of the fiction that gets translated into English is novella length. It may be that the novella is a more dominant form in other countries than it is in the U.S., or it may be that shorter books are easier to translate and therefore easier to publish. Either way, there are many wonderful novellas in translation to choose from.

Personally, I love reading novellas: they are long enough to create the feeling of immersion in a story, but not so long that I, as a slow reader, feel bogged down. They are also a great way to try out new authors and styles without a major investment of time. If you like what you find, you can search out other books by that author or in that style.

Also, if you fall in love with a particular novella in translation, you can seek out other work from that country or region. The books in the list below come from Mexico, Palestine, Japan, Argentina, Switzerland, France, Colombia, and South Korea. Reading one of these might inspire you to learn more about the literary culture and traditions of that place.

You might also find a new favorite author. I have read and loved the books in this list and have gone on to seek out other work by these writers. You might have the same experience!

How a 'very simple story' became a number one TV hit

April 8 – May 21, 2022

February 24 – May 29, 2022

1

Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art.

I did not think much then about why they appealed to me. Some of the other images on my board were actual found photographs, as in ones I found on the street, including a glossy, black-and-white roadside image of a crime scene, probably photographed by highway patrol, then ripped in half. Like the collages I sometimes made on notebooks containing my first drafts, none of these pictures were meant as literal inspiration; they were just references for daydreaming, vague and strange enough that they might compel some unexpected sentence or train of thought.

In one of the Kelly postcards I’d pinned up, four irregular squarish panels of slightly diluted shades of blue, yellow, green, and red are pasted like a scrim over a landscape of a mountain and lake. They reminded me of endless things, like Baldessari dots that simultaneously redirect the eye elsewhere and draw it back to the point of obfuscation, piquing curiosity about what it conceals. In their pure arrangement of color, the postcards were pleasingly like the faded multicolored flags that flutter over used car lots, like the surprise patterns and colors of paint that emerge on adjacent boarded-up windows when old city buildings are torn down. They were both curtains and windows, shielding what lay behind them and opening into something else.

Marcus, Luke and Pete recap a tough night for Rangers as their European adventure comes to a bitter end. STOP BRINGING PLAYERS ON FOR PENALTIES! 

We also turn our attentions to two former men of this sleazy parish, as José Mourinho fires up the Roma faithful and Alan Pardew joins us from his Sofia bungalow. Single bed, thankfully.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.