Shelf Lives, Vol. 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I'm excited to introduce a new feature at the New Dork Review of Books: Shelf Lives.

Here's the story behind Shelf Lives: My bookshelf is a trip into my past. Every book there has a story about how I came to it, when/where I bought/read it, and what was going on in my life at the time I bought/read it. Many, probably most, of these stories are pretty mundane. Some are not, and these are the stories I want to tell. Why does a book make me feel a certain kind of way when I catch a glimpse of it sitting on my shelf? What specific memories does it evoke? What connections does my brain immediately begin making to music, food, time/place, and other books?

Over the years, I've had to purge hundreds of books from my shelves to avoid being buried, so the ones that remain are truly special. Getting older makes you nostalgic, and so I decided I wanted to spend a post or two each month writing about some of the stories behind my most beloved books. It's entirely possible these stories are only interesting to me. But I do hope you enjoy them too. I also hope these stories give you occasion to think about the stories behind your own most-loved books.

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Volume 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's Labor Day weekend, 2013, and my then-fiancée-now-wife's mother is in town to help her shop for wedding dresses. So I decide to make myself scarce and head out on an epic road trip. My plan is to drive around the Midwest to new-to-me bookstores, including Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, and Subterranean Books and Left Bank Books in St. Louis, among others.

I wrote a blow-by-blow account of this pretty epic adventure here. (Amazingly, the links to the photos on Flickr still work! Also, I still have the trusty blue Honda Civic. 😅) Writing about that trip was nearly as much as the trip itself. Rereading that post now makes me laugh.

So of course I came back from that trip with a huge stack of new books. But of all the books I bought on that trip, by far the most enduring, most important, and my favorite is Adichie's Americanah. I've written a lot about how much I love this book (here is my original raving review), and I've been thinking about it a lot lately as I'm about to read her new novel, Dream Count (out March 4) -- her first novel since Americanah.

Americanah is such a terrific examination of American foibles (especially related to race) and so it remains a perfect match in my mind for that road trip, in which I also discovered my share of Americana and American foibles -- the dude who draped his jeans and underwear over the bed of his truck (presumably to dry after he'd washed them in his room? I hope?) in the parking lot of a motel, for instance.

Even though I didn't actually read the novel until two months after this road trip, Americanah and that adventure are inextricably linked in my mind. This was also the first time I'd read Adichie, and I've since read every word she's written -- easily one of my top 5 favorite writers.

Because I loved the book so much, and think about it often, the book also gives me an excuse to think back fondly on that trip. Maybe it's time to do that again. I never re-read books, but maybe it's time to give Americanah another look, too.