On Another Brooklyn + Half of a Yellow Sun

Normally, when I’m looking for a new book to read, I take a thorough, research-based approach: I scour best-of lists, scroll through reviews on Amazon, seek out author interviews. I know it’s a little ridiculous — it reminds me of the scene in Master of None where Dev spends so long sorting through online reviews to determine New York’s best tacos that by the time he actually makes it to the winning truck, they’ve run out of tacos — but each book feels like such an investment of time, money, and attention. Lately, however, I’ve been spending more time at my local public library, and it’s brought some serendipity back into the process. Not having to spend money on library books helps, of course, and so do the constraints around browsing at the library: I’ll often stop by after work, when I have limited time and just want to grab something from the “new arrivals” section in the front of the building.

Last month, a shelf of “books on female friendship,” pulled together by the library staff for Women’s History Month, led me to pick up Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, which portrays a woman revisiting turbulent memories from growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. As I read, a passing line in Another Brooklyn — “Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra,” admonishes the narrator’s mother — made me remember another book that had been quietly lingering on my to-read list, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which takes place during the devastating civil war between Nigeria and the secessionist republic of Biafra. I picked up Half of a Yellow Sun the next week.

Reading these two books in succession was interesting study in compare and contrast — both in terms of the books themselves, and in terms of how I read them. The books certainly have some significant things in common: both are rooted, to some extent, in a home and an innocence lost; both portray and grapple with memory, violence, and trauma; their time periods partially overlap, and each uses stories of personal relationships to capture a particular place within that period. In the passage that first reminded me of Half of a Yellow Sun, Another Brooklyn’s narrator reflects on the disparities and echoes between her world and the one that Half of a Yellow Sun depicts: “If angels truly existed, I thought, they had come to life as Biafran children, haunting and only halfway here. No, we were not poor like this. Our bellies were filled and taut. Our legs were thin but muscled. Our hair was oiled, clean. But still.”

Despite these connections, the authors take different routes through their core themes. Jacqueline Woodson was the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, and Another Brooklyn is essentially poetry as prose. I read it pretty much in one sitting, because it felt like the kind of thing you had to be completely immersed in. A plot threads it way through the book, but it’s sewn only loosely, with lots of space for interior musing and atmospheric language. Rather than immersing you in a story, the book uses memory to immerse you in a world, creating the low-volume buzz of that world’s everyday danger. You feel the shine that comes with newly acquired membership in a girl gang, the fog of dazed grief, the prickly feeling of someone standing a little too close to you.

When I emerged from Another Brooklyn, I turned to Half of a Yellow Sun. Half of a Yellow Sun is a more typically plot-driven novel, bringing together a collection of characters and perspectives to illustrate a slice of history. Vividly written, the book commingles everyday, human concerns — romantic relationships, family dynamics — with the horrific events that took place in this period: massacres, air raids, starvation. As we grow invested in the characters, we watch them struggle with tragedies personal and political, local and national; we mourn with them. The forward motion of the plot let me read the book like I usually read — in chunks spread out over Sunday mornings, weeknight evenings, and the occasional lunch break. I also found myself reading it in the more networked way I often seem to read these days: reading a page, taking a pause to Google a name, reading some more, closing the book, searching “Biafra” on Wikipedia or zooming into Port Harcourt on Google Maps.

The difference between this spread-out, augmented experience and the one-time, full-immersion dunk I took into Another Brooklyn got me thinking about different modes of reading. Both books stayed with me, but in different ways; it makes me curious to pay more attention to different cadences of reading. I also appreciate that a shelf full of books on female friendship ultimately led to me reading online historical sources on a region that I knew relatively little about, with two very different books as stops along the way. It makes me eager to get out of my own way again, to stop always searching for the optimal book online and to instead walk into the library with nothing on my list.