Book Date No. 11

A trip to Center for Fiction with podcast producer Mbiye Kasonga

Another book date from the archives—this time with my Sylly cohost Mbiye Kasonga. We went to Center for Fiction last July and it quickly turned into an hours-long conversation at Tacombi about everything from long-term relationships to situationships to the prosperity gospel. I like to think that dinner kicked off the beginning of our collaboration and moved us from mutuals to friends. Read about our date, below.

Can you state your name for the record?

Mbiye Kasonga.

I love your name so much.

Gosh, thank you.

What do you do?

I do a lot. I work as a market researcher in my day job. I also produce podcasts. I sometimes write for The Strategist about beauty products. I have my own podcast. It's called Unbound. I look good.

Period. Where are you from?

I am from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I grew up in in Newport News, Virginia.

How did you become a reader? What was your reading life like as a child?

I was a huge, huge reader. As a kid, I was reading 10 to 12 books a week. When I came to the States I was five years old and didn't speak any English. It became really clear that I needed to start reading a lot in order to catch up and get into school, so that was a big catalyst. I fell deeper into it and started to find reading material that I really loved and then it took off from there. I was a very early reader.

What kind of stuff were you reading?

I was reading a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. So Eragon, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson. I liked Hunger Games when it came out. I liked a lot of those dragon books. There were a lot of those at that time. I was also reading Judy Blume. I was reading a lot of Meg Cabot. I remember finding the Twilight series in middle school and devouring those books. I was also reading things that felt pretty literary for kids like Flowers for Algernon. It's about a lab rat, which tells you everything. I started to discover Morrison in high school, but I really stuck in that fantasy, YA realm for a long time.

What are the books that shaped you?

I hate to give JK Rowling any credit at all, but Harry Potter. It was such a formative experience for me, especially because it was coming out as I was growing and the stories were getting more complex. It felt like I was growing with the characters, I found a lot of meaning from those books as a kid. I also loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has kind of the same vibe where you're growing with the characters. Then books like, Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, Harriet, The Spy. Lots of books about girlhood. Seeing the characters on the page made me consider myself as a character in my life. So something as simple as Harriet, the Spy was like, oh, I have the autonomy to create my own adventures. I was always able to extrapolate and feel like I could model these characters in some way. Song of Solomon, absolutely incredible book. I've read it twice. I also hate to give Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie any credit, but Americanah was the first book I read by an African female author, and that was huge for me in realizing that my worldview could be put in a story on the page. That was mind blowing for me. A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is definitely on that list. It's a really weird book. Essentially there's this writer living on a remote island off the coast of Canada and this diary washes ashore. It belongs to a little girl from Japan and it chronicles a lot of different things. It’s a great meditation on time, life, what we're doing with it, how we can shape our own lives to be more meaningful, community, family. Ruth Ozeki is really interesting to me as an author. She's big on meditation as a practice. She says her characters come to her through meditation. And there was one more—Severance by Ling Ma. That book really sticks with me. I'm always kind of thinking about it, especially post pandemic.

How many books did you read last year?

I didn't keep track because the year before that I read 50 books. I was really on my Goodreads. I was logging, I was doing the thing, and it made it so not fun. I didn't like it. I didn't like having a number that I was reaching so I didn't track last year. If I'm not trying though, I read about 30 books a year, so that's my best guesstimate. If I try, I can hit like 50, but that's a little harder.

What was your favorite book of last year?
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I loved how much detail there was in the world building. It wasn't a fantasy by any means, but you really felt like you were in the dorm room with them, in college with them. I felt the same sense of gratification reading her descriptions of the video game. I think part of the reason I loved it is because it shouldn't have been a book for me. I don't play video games, but it really hooked me. I have to give the author props.

What's your favorite book you've read so far this year?

I've read a couple good ones this year. Martyr! ranks high among them. It was great. Honey continues to stand out for me partially because it was the most recent book I read, but there's a line in there that I literally am still thinking about. I don't even know if I'm quoting it correctly. She's talking about this pop star and at some point she realized that her life wasn't what was real, she crawls into her life and inhabits it almost. That book was such a good combination of subject matter that's been interesting to me—we've been talking about pop stars and all of the wrong that society has done to them—and then prose that is just sumptuous. It really ticked all the boxes for me. Then The Autobiography of Gucci Mane.

Period. I heard that’s really good.

So good. His ghost writer really ate that up. It's very, very compelling. Another great book from last year, A Little Devil in America. It took me all year to finish.

I read it in little bits at a time, but it compels me to write. He's so brilliant. What are you reading right now?

I'm cycling through a few. I have The Fraud by Zadie Smith, which I've been reading for several months. It's very good. But it is a Charles Dickens annotation. It really is pip pip cheerio. If I'm not feeling that, which I often am not, I just put it down. I'm reading the sequel to Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, which is fine. The second one gets annoying. Part of it is I've read too many of these children-in-mortal-danger-type books and she's not even a child. It's not that fun being in a 21-year-old girl's head. That second book you really feel it. She's spending so much time talking about this boy that she's in love with. My main thought is Hermione would never. Hermione would know the stakes at hand.

Hermione would be focused on getting them horcruxes. How would you describe your reading taste?

I don't think every book that I read needs to be serious, but I like smart books. If it's beautiful at the sentence level and the story is full, I'm happy. I love a good generational family history. I love a good white mess book as well. I like speculative fiction a lot. There's obviously the Parable of the Sower’s of the world, but there's also Sharks in the Time of Saviors, which is a more modern day spec fiction book.