Website lists Achebe’s novel among world’s ’50 Most Influential Books’

Hello Friends!

An American academic website, SuperScholar, has listed ‘Things fall Apart’, a novel by Nigerian author and playwright, Prof. Chinua Achebe, among the ’50 Most influential Books.’

An Introduction on www.redlinesand deadlines.blogspot.com says, “SuperScholar is a site that helps aspiring college students find the right school to match their needs. It also offers advice on succeeding. So they have come up with a list of what they feel are the fifty most influential books published in the last fifty years.”

 It described Achebe’s book, published in 1958, as “the most widely read book in contemporary African literature, focuses on the clash of colonialism, Christianity, and native African culture.”

 Other books on the list include Mohammed Yunus ‘Banker to the Poor (1999, last edition 2007);’ Malcolm X’s ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ (1965); Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book, aka Quotations From Chairman Mao (1966); Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007, last edition 2010); Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (in three volumes, 1974-78); Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development (1984, last edition 1997); and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988).

A statement by Super Scholar(http://www.superscholar.org/features/50-most-influential-books-last-50-years) said in compiling the list, its editors tried to “provide a window into the culture of the last 50 years. Ideally, if you read every book on this list, you will know how we got to where we are today.
“Not all the books on this list are “great.” The criterion for inclusion was not greatness but INFLUENCE. All the books on this list have been enormously influential.
 

“The books we chose required some hard choices. Because influence tends to be measured in years rather than months, it’s much easier to put older books (published in the 60s and 70s) on such a list than more recent books (published in the last decade). Older books have had more time to prove themselves.

Selecting the more recent books required more guesswork, betting on which would prove influential in the long run.

 “We also tried to keep a balance between books that everyone buys and hardly anyone reads versus books that, though not widely bought and read, are deeply transformative. The Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa never sold as many records as some of the “one-hit wonders,” but their music has transformed the industry. Influence and popularity sometimes don’t go together. We’ve tried to reflect this in our list.

Culled from The Punch.

xoxo

Simply Cheska...