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@eminwords

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highlights of 25, as i enter 26 🌷🩷.

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it’s the season, happy birthday to me 🩷

last year, i had the thought that rather than having a photoshoot (which is the norm in nigeria), i wanted a collection of pictures/magazine made from my experiences throughout the year.

unfortunately, my inclination to forgetfulness and terrible internet connection these past few weeks, has made me start this collection later than i would have like, but here is a cover of my little collection of things from my 25th year alive. by @eminwords

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3 months ago

🌷 #qotd : has an audiobook/voice acting ever made you rate a book higher than you’d normally rate it?

☁️book review:

blood of old kings is an epic by sung il kim following three characters from colonised provinces in an oppressive empire as they unwittingly start a revolution.

loran, a widowed swordswoman who makes a pact with a legendary dragon from her province/country after the unjust execution of her daughter and husband, declaring herself princess and subsequently king, a title she lives up to. arienne, a young sorcerer who escapes the academy with the office of truth’s best kept secret and learns true sorcery and bravery on the run. cain, an ordinary man from the docks who ends up gaining mastery over one of the most feared instruments in the empire while investigating the murder of his friend.

the story on its own was passably good and enjoyable. the plot was fine, almost average, there was nothing particularly groundbreaking about the plot and storyline. the characters, while not the most compelling, grew on me while listening— particularly arienne and loran, i found cain disappointing at the end of the book. i did have a good time listening to this book, particularly because the narrators did an amazing job with it and the narration matched the character’s personalities.

overall, i rated it 3.75 stars. by @eminwords

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3 months ago

🌷what’s one book on your june tbr?

☁️i’ve been saving the bone river by albert nkereuwem for over six months, just so i can read it in june. (one can only imagine what would happen if i put this amount of dedication into my writing, but alas!)

🌷the bone river is sapphic urban fantasy set in the city of calabar, nigeria centring a power featuring powerful houses and magic, necromancy, malevolent gods and a struggle for power. i’m really excited to start reading this, but i need to finish my current read (i, tituba black witch of salem for carribean american month) before jumping into this one. i need to practice self control for once 🙂‍↕️🩷.

i hope you enjoy your june reads 🩷 by @eminwords

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4 months ago

🌷☁️what is your favourite comfort media or comfort book?🌷☁️

comfort book(s): love from a to a by sk ali, the psychangeling series by nalini singh, get a life chloe brown by talia hibbert, immortals after dark series by kresloy cole

comfort media: at the moment, manga and manhwa

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hi loves!! it’s been so long and i’ve missed you all terribly. what started as a brief ramadan break ended up being longer because life changes and a toxic work environment (which i’m out of now because i quit). it’s been especially rough these past few weeks, dealing with a draining job, a fibro flare up and a few personal hardships.

i’ve been binging manhwa when i’m not working on finishing a sr project or straight up doomscrolling, but in good news i read for 30 minutes yesterday so i’m really happy about that. i can’t wait to get back to myself, to post more often here and connect with friends again and find ways to do more advocacy through literature and cultural critic.

till next time, my loves 🌷☁️ by @eminwords

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5 months ago

🌷what books have you read on sudan? or what sudanese books do you plan to read?🌷

☁️stock photo credit: ahmed alghali
🌷location: university of khartoum, khartoum, sudan

|For Ramadan 1447AH, the Ramadan Readathon region of focus is Sudan. Regions of focus are areas where Muslims (and non Muslims) live under oppression. RR seeks to draw attention to their plights and encourage readers to learn about them.|

Sudan is more than ‘area of conflict’, it is a country with a long and rich history, including a legacy of beautiful and lush literature. This isn’t an exhaustive list of Sudanese literature as unfortunately many Sudanese literary works are untranslated and some inaccessible but we hope you enjoy this post on Sudan in literature.

For this post we decided to categorise the books either based on the time and primary city the stories are set in or type of story (ie collections/anthologies and poetry).

#sudan #sudaneseliterature #bookstagram #ramadanreadathon #ramadan taken in University of Khartoum by @eminwords

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8 months ago

🌷what are you reading by a muslim author this ramadan?🌷

☁️stock photo credit: ahmed alghali
🌷location: shendi, sudan

🌙ramadan mubarak to everyone observing the holy month. for muslims across the world, ramadan is a period dedicated to improving our spirituality and our connection to Allah and our faith. spirituality isn’t separate from advocacy and activism in Islam, in fact it’s a core part of our religion. with many Muslims living under oppression, it’s important for us to step back into this tradition.

@muslimreadathon hosts a readalong each year and for the past three ramadans, we’ve been highlighting a region with Muslims living in conflict/under oppression. this year, our spotlight is Sudan. so today i’ll be sharing my ramadan tbr which includes books from sudanese authors and about sudan

🌷PRIORITY READS: SUDAN
⁃ The River Spirit by Leila Aboulela (RR 2026/ 1447AH fiction pick)
⁃ An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi
⁃ Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (Sudanese post colonial classic)
☁️PRIORITY READS: REFLECTION
⁃ Ramadan Reflections by Aliyah Umm Raiyaan (RR 2026/ 1447AH reflections pick)
⁃ Al Fawa’id by Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyyah
🌷THE MAYBES
⁃ Love From Mecca to Medina by SK Ali
⁃ The Baby Dragon Cafe by AT Qureshi

remember to reflect this ramadan and read and care about Sudan.🩷 taken in Sudan by @eminwords

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8 months ago

🌷what’s a book that deeply and fiercely consumed you recently?🌷

☁️immortal dark has me in a chokehold last week. i could hardly think of anything but it and @admirerofbooks was the victim of my musings☁️

REVIEW

Kidan Adane, an heiress to an old pact and terrifying magic is forced to enter a deadly institution after the disappearance of her twin sister, June. Armed with a feral rage, she’s willing to do anything and harm anyone who may be connected to the taking of her sister, especially who she believes is the primary suspect — her House’s beautiful and dangerous dranaic, Susenyos Sagad.

At its heart, Immortal Dark is a study in morality, desires and betrayal. It asks how far can one go to attain a goal, save a loved one or protect a legacy, and with the cast of characters, the answers seems to be as far as (in)humanly possible. Kidan, the protagonist of this story, is a morally questionable character. She has and will do the most cruel, devious and deadly things to find and protect her sister as well as everyone and everything she loves. She will scheme, manipulate and kill to protect the souls of those she loves.

Kidan has a god/martyr complex, and it becomes more evident as the plot progresses. The overall motive of all her actions is to protect the soul of others, even at the cost of her own. She will forcefully try to salvage the innocence and humanity of those who make her feel human, and will sacrifice herself for it, but Uxlay demands a price from everyone. The institution itself is a monstrosity looming over everyone and demanding they pay tribute to it, its philosophies are twisted and mangled and its rules deliberately deadly.
If Kidan is madness, then Uxlay is her fuel.

Then there is Susenyos, my dearest Susenyos. Susenyos is such a well written and wonderfully complex character just like Kidan. Kidan and Susenyos make a bloody and deadly pair, and I would follow them both to the end of world. by @eminwords

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8 months ago

🌷what did you enjoy most in january?🌷

☁️reading and meeting up with loved ones☁️

this is abominably late but i’m glad i’m posting this because i almost gave up on it. january was a full month, which was a bit of surprise. i think the highlight of it was meeting my one silly goal of finishing the first book of the year on the first day of the year, and Black Girl, Call Home was a wonderful book to start the year with.

in reading, january was a good month. i was able to read two black classics (one african american classic — The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one african classic — Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe) which was part of my reading goal for the month and multiple volumes of manga i’d wanted to read for a long time. my top book of the month would still be Human Acts by Han Kang. it was beautiful and devastating.

i wonder what february will have in store for me. by @eminwords

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8 months ago

🌷what classics have you read or plan on reading?🌷

☁️my 26 of 2026 — classics edition (a picking list)☁️

hi loves! it’s been a while since i made a post because it took me quite some time to compile this list while being so busy. i’ve been thinking about reading more classics since last year, and i finally decided to just get on with it this year. for my classic picks, i did not want to adhere to the exclusionary and white (usually male also) standards, i wanted to have diverse range of classics from different regions of the world.

i think i did a fairly good job but i realised after that i missed some regions, particularly south of africa so i might add it to my extra lists.

i hope you find something that catches your interest on my picking list — sort of a relaxed tbr where you have options to pick from instead of a strict checklist, a perfect balance for a mood reader like me. i got the idea of a picking list from @breesbookmark by @eminwords

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9 months ago

🌷have you read a toni morrison book? if you have, what was your first book by her?🌷

☁️book review — the bluest eye☁️
one of the reading challenges that i decided to take part in this year is the ‘reading toni 2026’ challenge by @shay.thereader , and my first book is the bluest eye by toni morrison.

the bluest eye is an analysis on race, racism and everything intertwined with it in the united states, and unfortunately, there is a lot intertwined with race. the bluest eye tells the story of a young girl named pecola’s tragedy and her wish for the bluest eyes — a wish that in her view would grant her freedom. the bluest eye is, however, not just about pecola but also the characters around her and their subsequent lives and tragedies, and how their experiences led to her tragic end.

i was rather astonished by how, in less than 300 pages, ms morrison was able to truly discuss so many necessary topics without any awkwardness in the narrative. it’s impossible to talk about how well she does this without making a 10 pages essay but some of the topics the bluest eye explores is the intersections between race and beauty, desire, race and masculinity and femininity, race and classism, racism in healthcare, race and family dynamics, the influence of years of trauma and enslavement on parenting, race and poverty, and race, identity and community.

true to her foreword, in this book they are truly pitiable characters, most especially pecola, and characters whose backstories are pitiful but are deplorable and deeply unpleasant or unforgivable. i guess the biggest tragedy of this book was the complicity of the community and while you may understand why it got to where it was, its inexcusable, just like certain individual characters.

there are no words to briefly and truly capture the brilliance and tragedy of this book. i think everyone should read it and ponder on it. by @eminwords

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9 months ago

🌷starting the year with a post at my own pace because i refuse to be anxious and rushed anymore🌷

☁️do you read newsletters? if you do, what are you favourite newsletters?☁️

although i created my newsletter in late 2024, i began writing again and posting publicly on it around mid 2025.

curiouser by the minute has been a great outlet for me both creatively and personally (5 out of my 8 pieces have been personal). i’ve learned to love writing again after not being to do so for years, and being weird and scattered enough to do in a way that’s true to me. being able to explore my curiosities (oddities and interests) was the highlight of the year and i can’t wait to see how curious this new year shall be.

so here my letters from last year. my notes on my emotions; on grief and joy, on breathing and moving forward, on thoughts and control, and the beautiful and ugly of life. if you did read any of them which did you like the most?

there’s a lot i want to explore on my newsletter this year and i hope everyone gets to witness it. anyway, i hope you all have a wonderful and curious year. by @eminwords

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9 months ago

🌷these are a few of my favourite things🌷

☁️what are some of your favourite things?☁️

a very small glimpse of my favourite things colour coded to my favourite colour. it’s a shame i didn’t think to add more things, a little screen with my recent anime watches and my cat. the last week was a quite a week, it felt both slow and overly eventful at the same time, a odd and somewhat draining mix.

the things that have kept me sane these week are:
🌷reading pride and prejudice (a recommendation from @thetsundokuchronicles )
☁️reading a few manhwa with the same vibe as p&p
🌷reading more silly goofy manhwa (i found another manhwa with a girl failure!)
☁️finishing a crochet gift for a friend and beginning a new one for another friend
🌷finishing and publishing ‘manufacturing insecurity’
☁️reading articles on faith

all of which are some of my favourite things. so perhaps, this perplexing week wasn’t necessarily a bad one.🩷 by @eminwords

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10 months ago