Favourite Five: Kola Tubosun

Kola Tubosun

Kola Tubosun has published poetry, fiction, and travel articles in print and online publications around the world. His short story "Behind the Door" appeared in a 2010 short story anthology titled “Africa Roar”, available on Amazon. Author of a book of poems in English, Headfirst into the Meddle (2005), and an unpublished collection of translated poems and literary texts between Yoruba and English. Poems “E=mc2″ and “Creation Story” won the prestigious Christopher Okigbo Poetry Prizes in Ibadan in 2002 and 2004 respectively. Poem “Here, moving” won the Sentinel Poetry Bar Challenge in October 2006. He tells us about his five (plus one) favourite  books.

Surely You Must be Joking, Mr Feyman! Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman, physicist, artist and prankster, is one of my favourite characters, not just because of his work ethic or influence on modern science. He was also a person that valued the ordinary things of life, and did everything to live it to the fullest. That book, one of my first and most fascinating introduction to the man and to theoretical physics, is also one of my favourites. I read it again once in a while. I recommend the sequel as well "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", which featured a few more essays on a number of different things.

My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl

It's one of the funniest, brilliant adult fictions I've read by a writer of children stories. I haven't read any other book by Roald Dahl, but this book was a very notable introduction. I got it as a gift in 2005, and I have bought it about three more times after then. It always kept walking out of my shelf. Anyone who reads it will discover why. Never having read Maurice Sendak either - another brilliant children writer - Dahl has remained one of my favourites. This book, My Uncle Oswald, features an alternate history of the world through the foibles of writers, scientists and other famous people. Watch out also for a copious amount of ribaldry. 

Illustrissimi by Albino Luciani

Written as letters to historical figures (dead and alive), Pope John Paul 1 addresses a whole lot of issues from a unique and often non-pedagogical perspective. It is notable that he was also the pope with the shortest reign ever (33 days or so), and whose death is subject to a whole lot of controversy and conspiracy. I have not read the book again in over a decade, but I remember being moved by the depth and range of his thought on a whole number of issues which no other major religious leader (especially in the Catholic church) has touched since. I'm sure that there are part of the work that I will disagree with now as I did then, but the brilliance of the form and content makes it one of my favourite texts.

Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay
Part autobiographical, part fiction, the author takes you on a road from Scotland to Abuja. It is one woman's journey to finding her roots. I'm still on the first few chapters.

Miguel Street by VS Naipaul, and Ibadan by Wole Soyinka 

I can't figure which I like more. Both are a fictionalized retelling of a youth. Naipaul's account starts much earlier than Soyinka's, but my closeness to the events recounted in Soyinka's quasi memoir makes it all the more fascinating. Less innocent than an earlier account in Ake, and definitely more engaging than a subsequent one Isara, Ibadan is fun, playful, intriguing, and genuinely representative of a crucial time in the country's history. It's Nigeria's version of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. So is Miguel Street, by the way. Just much less fictional. Both writers are some of the world's best.