By Ikenna Uchenna Ezeani
Have you ever heard the saying that a reader lives a thousand lives, while the person who never reads lives only one? George R.R. Martin said that. He is the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels upon which the popular television series, Game of Thrones, is based. He built the entire fantasy world that went on to become a huge cultural influence worldwide, from nothing but his imagination and, I’m sure, a very serious reading habit.
His quote sounds like a nice thing to say, the kind of quote that you post on your WhatsApp status and move on from. But sit with it for a moment. A thousand lives. Think about what that actually means.
I am talking to you specifically, Nigerian teenager, sitting somewhere with your phone in your hand and the weight of WAEC on your shoulders. You, who has somehow convinced yourself that reading is either a punishment or a personality trait that belongs to a certain kind of person.
You know, the quiet one in class with the thick glasses. The one everybody calls a bookworm, like it is an insult, like being a worm that lives in books is somehow worse than being a person who never opens one. Let me tell you something about that bookworm. In ten years, that person will be the most interesting one in every room they enter. They will have opinions, and the language to express them beautifully.
They will understand the world in ways that people who only scrolled through it never quite managed to. They will write better, speak better, think better, negotiate better, and dream bigger. Why, you may ask? Because every book is a long conversation with a mind that has thought deeply about something, and every page you turn is your brain quietly getting stronger.
Now, I understand the resistance. Nigerian teens are not exactly swimming in reading culture. Sure, our parents occasionally use books as a threat rather than a gift. “Go and read your book” is rarely said with warmth in this country. And so somewhere along the line, reading became associated with obligation rather than pleasure, with the grind of academics rather than the joy of discovery. That is the tragedy.
Not that Nigerian teenagers are unintelligent or incurious, because they are some of the sharpest young people on this planet, but that so many of them have never been handed a book and told, genuinely, that this one is going to change something in you. So allow me to recommend some books. If you have never read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, start there.
It is the book that looked the Western world in the eye and told it, firmly and beautifully, that Africa had stories worth telling long before anyone came to tell them for us. It is also simply a masterpiece of storytelling, the kind that grabs you by the collar in the first chapter and does not let go. If you want something closer to home in the most literal sense, Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Last Days of Forcado
High is a warm, funny, deeply Nigerian story set entirely within the walls of a secondary school, and reading it feels less like reading and more like someone narrating your own life back to you with affection. For something that proves African writers can build entire worlds from scratch, Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer is a stunning fantasy rooted in African mythology and tradition, the kind of book that makes you proud of where your imagination comes from. And if you want prose so beautiful it almost hurts to read, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is a quiet, devastating, extraordinarily written story about family and silence and the cost of perfection, and it will stay with you long after you close the last page.
These are not textbooks. Nobody is going to examine you on them. That is precisely the point. Reading for pleasure is a different animal entirely from reading for a grade, and once you discover that difference, something shifts in you permanently. You start to notice that your vocabulary expands consciously. You start to find that you can hold longer, more complex thoughts in your head. You start to discover that you have opinions about things, real opinions, formed from exposure to ideas rather than borrowed from whoever was loudest in the room. You start, in the truest sense of the word, to grow.
There is a version of you that reads, and a version of you that doesn’t. The one that does is not smarter by nature or more disciplined by birth. They just made a decision, probably on some ordinary afternoon not unlike this one, to pick up a book and give it a chance. One book becomes two, two becomes a habit, and a habit becomes a life that is richer, wider, and more interesting than it would otherwise have been.
This country, with all its complications and all its potential, needs a generation of young people who have read enough to imagine it differently. Who has encountered enough ideas to know that things do not have to be the way they have always been. Who has the vocabulary, the vision, and the courage that come from having lived, through books, far beyond the boundaries of their own experience. That generation could be yours. It starts, as most important things do, with something small, a simple decision to read more.
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