how to give a loud, anxious f*ck about reading

Don’t bullshit anyone that you started reading at the age of nine. While that might be true, the conscious part of your mind that will remember the first true book that you read will come way later than nine years old. At eleven, you really have nothing much to do, except maybe be the good cousin and hold your aunties’ babies as they go to the salon and come back with greasy, half-eaten bundles of bhajia. You will watch soap operas, perhaps stare at models in S magazine in the Saturday Nation, or drool over handbags and recipes on Pulse. You will come across your brother’s Supa Strikas, Shujaaz, and things you will dismiss as stupid and pointless.

Now, before you gain stable structure, you must first get lost in that compulsory teenage season of desperate romance. You must wish that every book was as good as the Vampire Diaries TV show that your elder cousins can’t shut up about, and anything that does not speak to you in that way, you must judge it harshly. You might discover Colleen Hoover from friends of yours, and suddenly, you will think that perhaps your love life is sad, with a twisted happy ending where one of the characters has to die.

Splurge on Wattpad, Adult Jumper, and Tapas. However, there’s also Tumblr; you can’t ignore that. That is where your notes come to life with quotes that you must save in your gallery. After you come to the top of your class, your aunt will gift you a Kindle that she bought while coming from Amerikka, and you must finish all the books that are in there, even when they sound so distant and unrelatable; otherwise, you are being ungrateful.

But then again, there are books you must read so that you can actually graduate high school with stellar grades. Those well-written indoctrinating masses of paper and ink that you will ponder over night prep because they will be the only books standing between you staying awake and sleeping on your desk. These ones, whether you like them or not, you must get attached to. You must know what comes after certain scenes and what themes lie forlorn between the phrases and sentences. If you can’t do this, then you must forget about that iPhone your aunt promised you if you passed with straight As in English.

This time, it is your duty to underline new words with a pencil, words that must appear in your essays and occasionally be heard in your speech. During the holidays, make it your duty to carry these books even when you go to church. In the car, as your mom listens to Christina Shusho at an unacceptable volume, lean on the window and spend thirty minutes mindlessly hovering over the part where Olarinkoi wants to marry Resian. Cram these books, go over them again and again, combing through semantics and inferences, mittadha and maudhui, possible essays from the play, implications of the overarching themes and how they relate to contemporary society and very many other things that will be required of you at this time.

You will realize how difficult it is to read something else at this time, and most of your classmates will succumb to the fatality of this harsh arrangement, never to love books again. But you will notice that there are those stubborn ones, whose night preps will be unworried and unhurried, whose Inheritance will hide Dan Brown inside. Those for whom P.E. isn’t a time to play or go swimming, but to sit on a concrete seat and glue their eyes to Baldacci, the sadder version of Hemingway, and occasionally, Achebe, Ngugi, Kariamiti, Ella McLeod, Chimamanda, and Toni Morrison. You can’t help but compare how they don’t take their limited time before the finals seriously, and you wish not to be associated with that behavior.

In your gap year, don’t read much. You just came out of high school and TikTok is new to you. You must fulfill the obligatory ten hours of screen time as it requires of you; otherwi you’d die of boredom like those days when there are scheduled power outages and your phone is technically dead and WiFi is down anyway. Your aunty will send you more white girl books, and somewhere between her constant need to be in touch with you, your mother will mention that you barely even read nowadays. “Oooh,” your aunty will say, as though she has just discovered a cure for cancer. Then in the next parcel, whose sender address is somewhere in Illinois, there will be stashes of Joel Osteen, Goggins, Sincero, Gardener, Cardon, and Cheryl Strayed. Books whose accusatory tone could be summarized into, ‘You are too gone. Come back to the good girl era sef.’

There, in the bottom of this American package, you will come across the three must-reads. Becoming, The Audacity of Hope, and Dreams from My Father. Now, you MUST read these books and finish them, because, in essence, if you came across them and never read them, you are shitting on the whole community of people who believed in hope, and you deserve to be exorcised if you don’t find them at least interesting. See, there are things people won’t forgive you for doing, like loudly not liking Afrobeats or finding certain elements of popular culture insufferable. Not reading these books is up there, right above not giving a fuck about Lizzo and hating cats.

You will have discovered BookTok by now and your own read catalogue will pale in comparison to other readers. You must feel utterly useless when you add another one to your to-read list, because you agreed when you had a call with your friends that it has become atomically impossible for you to sit down and read. Share this list with your friends nonetheless, and note how many of them tick the Obamas’ books. Notice the trend, like how many actually like the self-help and motivational ones. Spend just a few minutes on TikTok agreeing with someone who says that motivational books build an illusory progress and foster a culture of rewarding the act of wanting to change and not exactly changing.

By the time you join college, you will realize that you have spent another year reading little but convincing yourself that reading about reading or watching many, many TikToks about reading is better than actually reading. Don’t worry, because, ideally, in college, you will find hundreds of people like you. Smart for the first semester, then dumb for a significant amount of time afterwards. You’ll carry many things to your new house, the one right on the estate outside campus, and among these things are a few Nigerian paperbacks that you would have bought when moving in. Friends of yours will borrow these ones, and they will never read them, and you will never see them either.

Time will chase itself, months loping into a year. Seasons of rain will be marred by seasons of exams and CATs. Ill-tempered lecturers will spoil your birthday moods, and your bookshelf will gather dust. A spider will weave a web from the edges of Stephen King, right above the smallness of A Spell of Good Things and two John Grishams, ending it at The River Between, its pages untouched since your eldest brother finished his KCSE English Paper 3.

Please don’t panic. There is a time and season for everything. A time to bed rot while doomscrolling, and a time to sit by the window cafe in uptown, another brand new book in hand as your coffee cools, and then be distracted, pulling you into another hour of doom-scrolling. A time to grow headaches over PDFs right before your exams, and a time to read a chapter Splendid Suns, then shamelessly sleeping right before a twister is introduced. Your time to read will come.

It might start months later, when you’ve finally given up the hypocritical art of giving a fuck about books. Yes, growing up will make you weary of carrying things you wished to start doing while younger but never did. But there will be that book that you will not resist. It will be absolutely clandestine. Everyone will be talking about it. Even your favorite mind-rot TikToker will talk about it. ‘How dare he?’ will be the trend, something about a character being unhinged to his girlfriend on a whole-nother lever. People will be recording themselves, mouths wide open, unable to believe what they are reading. You won’t mind it much, well, until, on your friend’s chat, you’ll see through the blend feature that the book was suggested for her.

It will happen that this friend will have the book and you will borrow it, and you will have no plan of returning it. When you get it, you will notice how colorful it is, and the title, emboldened, will summon you like one of those Pinterest boards. You will think it would look good on your aestheticized Instagram profile and so the first thing that shall do is to take a photo of it. Then you will turn it around and grace it from the back. There, there is where the spicy stuff is.

It seems interesting, you will say, and as soon as your friend shows symptoms of talking about it, you will promptly shush, don’t spoil it for me.

Now you will unfold it on your couch at home, and there will be lemon tea beset on a small mug with the name Nescafe. You will set it right before you, and take another photo, this time making sure your nails and the lemon tea appear in the frame. You will look at the photo, and decide it’s not good enough. You will change positions for better lighting, and then you will take another photo, and then another, and then figure out that only one of the ten that you’ve taken is good-looking, only then will you post it on your story and status. Oh, before you will start, you will take one last one for Locket, and a quick live one for Snapchat.

You will go to the kitchen counter to add a little hot water and sugar to your lemon tea. As you do, someone would have liked your status, and you’ll look at it yourself, and feel that helpless happiness that you get whenever someone likes your status. By the time you are taking the seat to truly start reading, three more people would have liked your story, and one girl from your class will ask, could you kindly lend me after you finish?

I don’t lend my books, you will lie with laughing emojis, and lie again by telling her, I can buy you a copy, though. She will ask, really? That’s so sweet of you.

You will start reading, but soon it will be too cold and you will close your windows and draw your curtains. You will remove your clothes from the hanging line and scuttle back to the book, which will be waiting patiently under the blanket on the couch.

Remember, looking good while reading is always the go-to. You must appear pretty when you are reading. Otherwise, reading isn’t an aesthetic anymore. So you will record one quick one before the sky darkens for the rain. A small video you will edit later, or now. Yes, small but it will feel like a thousand pieces of a puzzle you have to jig together. An hour reduced into a one-minute thing that you will post with the caption: spend the day with me doing absolutely nothing but what i love; reading.

After that, you will start, your mind porous with expectations and distractions, memes you would want to forget, and popular songs from your Spotify. You will change your position on the couch and face the wall. You will switch on the lights and get a Sharpie, highlighter, pen, and notebook. You will pull your blanket to your breast. You will check for a text or two, and then yawn. You will nearly start dozing, but sit upright to concentrate. After twenty-seven minutes, you will stand, put music in the background and start cooking.