World Blog Day: My Two Blog Recommendations

Today is World Blog day and it’s been 8months since I started work on this blog. I’ve totally enjoyed every single piece that I have put up here.

How did it start? I already have this blog, started exactly a year ago today, that is solely devoted to Ghanaians and our peculiarities. It’s the place where I like to write the informal stuff and divert reader attention from all the stressful news that the world throws at us now.

I attended Barcamp Ghana last year and met a host of exciting Ghanaian entrepreneurs and innovators. Some were into technology, others were into literature and some still into cinema. The one thing that struck me was that, just like me, they all blogged. The idea of blogging was only a year or so old to me and here I was in a meeting with people who had years-old blogs. This was good company.

I sat behind Nana Fredua Agyeman during the break-out session on Blogging and Social Media and it was there I found that he was a book blogger on ImageNations. I discovered his blog then and I was more than a bit impressed. I remember asking him a few questions about rights and such-like when reviewing intellectual property and he let me know that even the authors would be pleased to have anyone read and review their works. I was elated.

ImageNations

I discovered Kinnareads, another book blog and followed it consequently. I can’t tell how I stumbled upon this one but I am most inclined to think I found it either from Nana Fredua’s blog, or by Kinna’s own comment on one blogpost I did on the Top 20 Most Irritating Ghanaian English phrases of all time. No, it couldn’t have been, because I replied that comment with a certain familiarity to her work. And like me, these two mentioned are Ghanaian. So, I was pleasantly challenged to get blogging on literature, because I have my own love for poetry. I have a lot of poetry books that sit in my library and when I read them, it aches that all the hyped work is non-African. There are lots of beautiful poems from Africa and it’s only a pain that we don’t read African poetry much. Our poets are as good as the Poes and Wordsworths, the Blakes, the Frosts and all. I found myself on the first day of a journey to change all that.

KinnaReads

On the day I began this blog (and I remember Kinna gave some direction on moderating then too), I had it in mind that I may not be able to ever review all African poetry but whatever I can do is a worthwhile life’s project. Combining all this literary work with an engineer’s itinerary makes it even more challenging but this is what I have chosen to do. Till death do us part.

So today, instead of recommending to you 6 literary sites to mark the sixth anniversary of World Blog Day, I will urge you to read these two Ghanaian book bloggers who have inspired my work; Kinnareads and ImageNations. One day, the sky shall be reached and surpassed. Happy blogging everybody.