Enjoyed this sprawling family saga, A History of Burning by Janika Oza. A boy from Gujarat is tricked into become an indentured servant building the Mombasa-Kampala railroad around 1900. After the end of his work, he remains and hardscrabbles a new life. His granddaughter Latika becomes a central figure for most of the book, as the descendants move to Canada after the Amin expulsion of 1972. If you liked the bittersweet coda of Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala you’ll definitely want to read this book.
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Recent Posts
- AI as an existential threat – Kevane preliminary draft
- “What can it do?” A living list of computational problems that deep learning/AI/neural nets can or seems likely to “do” (at varying cost and efficacy)
- Reading August-September 2025
- The typical popular sci-fi version of AI posing an existential risk?
- AI productivity growth and “the economy”
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Une sortie d’animation avec la Bibliothèque Mobile Pénélope (BMP)
- A few recent photos from Tuy libraries in Burkina Faso
- Interview d’une lectrice du centre de lecture et d’étude de Béréba CLEB
- General meeting at Sumbrungu Community Library
- Résumé des évaluations des bibliothèques de Koho, Dohoun et Dimikuy
- Une élève découvre la bibliothèque communautaire de Boni
- Reading locally produced books… very popular in Burkina Faso
- Animation d’une séance de lecture à la bibliothèque de Boni
- Photo from Dohoun library in Burkina Faso
- Préparatifs de l’équipe de ABVBF pour la FILO 2025