Nicole Blades’ Three Bookish Thoughts

Hello Welcome to My Jamaican Vignettes. 

Three Bookish Thoughts is a My Jamaican Vignettes series where authors are invited to share their thoughts on books. Each feature the writer is asked three simple questions, ranging from currently reading lists, favourite authors, book inspirations, and book adaptations.

Today author Nicole Blades shares her three bookish thoughts. Nicole Blades is the writer of two novels Earth’s Waters and  The Thunder Beneath Us. 

Nicole Blades is a writer and journalist who has been putting her stories on paper since the third grade. Born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, by Caribbean parents, Nicole moved to New York City and launched her journalism career working at Essence magazine.

She later co-founded the online magazine SheNetworks, and worked as an editor at ESPN and Women’s Health. Now a freelance writer, her features and essays have appeared in MORE magazine, Cosmopolitan, NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com, MarieClaire.com, SELF, BuzzFeed, and BlogHer.

You can find Nicole Blades on Twitter, Facebook and on official her author website.

Nicole Blades’ Three Bookish Thoughts

1. What is the last good book you read, what made this book so good?  I read a lot of books and these kinds of questions always stump me. So instead of the last good book, I’ll just highlight the last book I read. I recently finished reading The Light Between Oceans. Set in the early 1920s, the novel is about a lighthouse keeper named Tom who works on this small island—a rock, really—off the the Australian coast. He’s there with his wife, who has suffered horribly, mourning a recent stillbirth after enduring two miscarriages before that. One day a baby washes ashore in a boat with a dead man (presumed her father). The wife convinces the righteous lighthouse keeper to keep the newborn and raise her as their own. Of course, this baby is not a true orphan and this is where the tangled threads come into play. I really liked this book because from page one, it plants you right there on this lonely, sad island with these lonely sad people. The writing draws you in and keeps you locked in wondering how this couple’s choice will undoubtedly fall apart. There are moments of melodrama, but overall it’s a good read! Now, I need to find where I can catch the movie.

2. Who are your favourite authors? Another question has me in a slight pickle! The list is long. It includes authors like Alice Munro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler,  Zadie Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and magazine writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. Then, there are screenwriters and artists like Issa Rae, Donald Glover, Sarah Polley, Ava DuVernay, and Vince Gilligan. And then there’s another jumbo list of one-off books or short stories that I could re-read every year—if somehow I figured out how to make more hours in the day.

3. What are you currently reading? I’ve got a couple books going at once. I’ve been slowly reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It truly is an epic tale, so I’m taking my time with it. I’m also working on Hidden Figures. I was hoping to finish the book before seeing the movie, but couldn’t resist! So glad I did. The film was outstanding.  I also recently bought a Kindle (I’m very new to ebooks!) and downloaded a bunch of things on it. One that I’m reading now is Queen Sugar. I’ve watched the TV series and it’s crazy how different it is from the book. Some of the TV show characters are like night and day from their book iteration. Next on my TBR list is Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

Thanks Nicole for sharing your three bookish thoughts.   I loved reading The Thunder Beneath Us, check out the review of the book here on MJV. And I hope to get to Earth’s Waters soon.