Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good-nosed bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm, and I'm very happy because once again, I've read an extraordinary book.

It's by a writer who is new to me, although it is her fourth book to be published in America.

The book is called Americana, and the author is Chimamanda Adichie.

I was thrilled to read this book because it not only presents a Nigerian woman in America, but a Nigerian woman whose

literary sensibility is being shaped by the culture she sees around her. She writes blogs,

she becomes famous as a race blogger. What is a race blogger? I don't know. I think I made

that up. Because you invent conventions of them. I have never blogged in my life. I find I read blogs.

Not so many anymore, but I used to.

And I'm very interested in the form because it's such an interesting and strange thing,

and there's an immediacy to it.

And I think Americana is about, among other things, about the love of reading.

Because it's a book in which the characters

come to read and love books. If Emelro is a character who started up not really being

interested in reading. When she comes to the US in particular, she actually finds a certain

consolation in books. She discovers American literature and she starts to read. And I think her

blogging is an extension of that.

Well, she falls in love with a man who loves to read American novels.

...