No Sweetness Here by Ama Ata Aidoo

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Half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Yes. Definitely. I'd heard of Biafra, I thought it was about famine. Turns out that famine was a deliberate war strategy to starve a section of what is now Nigeria into submission. This is the story. I'm aware it pretty much followed rich Biafrans, with some visits to camps of starving people, rather than having its protagonists suffer the full event. Even so, worth knowing, important stuff. Dreadful film btw.
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So you've been publicly shamed - Jon Ronson

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This was ok. Interesting ideas linking twitter shaming to the stocka and thinking about the power of shame in other ways, like in prisons. Quite a lot of padding, I thought, as you followed the author chronologically so you left things then came back to them. Probably could have lost a third of the book, but it was an easy read so I didn't really mind. I don't really get what was so bad about the first example - this man who made up some Bob Dylan quotes. Apparently this mystification makes me typically British. Long term impact of reading the book - going to be realy really careful what I write in this blog.
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Maybe read it. Lots of ideas and interesting takes on the world. Quite a lot of plot, which said ideas are kind of dumped into. It's a future world where consumption is encouraged with no angst or inkling of the enviromental consequences. So I suppose, in the age of patio heaters and throw away coffee cups, he got that right. Children are conditioned into accepting their social class and their world by the repetition of phrases and some aversion training. Tick again. There's a very interesting idea that women have been conditioned to accept the unnatural. They hate the idea of monogamy and of motherhood. That's an interesting assumption about the natural state of women. The book's not about that though, that's an aside. It's about two men really. One of them is definitely a sympathetic character because he speaks in a lot of Shakespeare quotes, despite being a savage. The real savage are the civilised ones who don't know any Shakespeare. Hmmm. It's...
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