100 Facts
GRAPHIC BOOK SERIES BY MILES KELLY
I recently tweeted "Bring back books" on Twitter. I wasn't just doing this for effect, I am actually getting back into books myself. I'm not a great reader sadly. I wish I was, but I wasn't really interested in reading as a young lad because I had reading difficulties. I'd say it's a mild form of dyslexia, but I was never diagnosed with it.
Medical exceptions weren't a thing back then. If you had any issues, you were presumed to be "slow" and left to rot at the back of the class. I escaped that label though, since I could do mathematical calculations very quickly in my head without the need for log tables or any aid. I baffled teachers I think. I was a kind of dumb genius. I scored 100% constantly at maths or logic related subjects like Quantitatives, but I always nearly failed English.
Fun fact: A lot of adults that identify as "dyslexic" have self-diagnosed.
The way I got round reading long books, was listening to them. Audiobooks! I was lucky to be born in such a time that Audiobooks became a thing in my lifetime. I consume, and have consumed a lot of books this way.
I have read some books the traditional way of course, but they'd taken me 3-4 times as long as the standard reader to finish. I once read an enormous Egyptology book that took me over a year to finish, but I was determined to finish it. I still have that book somewhere in storage. I'll dust it off one day and show it to you.
Talking of Egyptology, I'm a bit of an amateur Egyptologist myself. I'm also learning Medu Neter - the language of Ancient Egypt. One day I'm going to be able to visit the Valley of The Kings and read directly off the walls. It's actually not as hard as it may originally seem.
I also love graphic novels that don't have too much text. I was a fan of comics when I was young. I used to read those, as well as draw my own. I read the heck out of Spider-man comics as well as Archie Comics. Anybody remember Archie?.
The iPad! Even more so than the Kindle, ushered in an amazing rebirth of comics and graphic novels. In this post, I wanted to share with you a series that I am currently enjoying. It's a very well presented format that is both easy to read and informative. It's called "100 Facts" by Miles Kelly.
They are cheap as chips at £2.99 in the UK Apple Books store. Each topic is presented as 100 facts and by the end of reach book you'd have a generally sound summary of the subject, and could probably hold semi-informed conversation about it. it's brilliant light reading over a coffee.
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I actually found the series when looking for books about "Ancient Egypt" in the Apple Books store. It was also the first one I purchased and read. I like the way the information was laid out. Of course I already knew most of the information presented, but I still enjoyed reading it in a visual way. The illustrations are just exquisite, even if they took some artistic freedoms with the depiction of some of the characters. Imhotep The Great, for instance - we have a pretty good idea what he looked like. There are numerous busts and statues of him, being arguably the greatest multi-genius of ancient times. He looks a little different in the book :)
Having said that, I was extremely pleased to see Anubis on the very first page. It's a nuance that most people may not get. He is the guardian of the underworld and protector of the gate into the 'world of the dead'. So as you venture into the book about the ancient ones, it's only apt to have Anubis on the first page, ushering you in.
100% factual?
Afrocentric Egyptologists would probably cringe at some of the sentences in this book. An example is the term "Kemet", which was the actual name the ancients called their land. It means "Black Land". The concept can actually be found throughout Africa. "Sudan" for instance (which would have been partially Kemet in those days, and part Kush) also means "Black Land", in Arabic. "Nigeria" means the same thing in Latin.
The soil around the Nile is very dark because when it inundates, mineral-rich soil brought from East and Central Africa is deposited on the banks, providing arable land in the desert. Of course the rest of Ancient Egyptian land wasn't "black", but the light brown of the Sahara. So that assumption that they named their land after just that strip of river bank is questionable.
Afrocentrists would argue that they were referring to their skin colour. It wouldn't have been the Egyptians themselves who named their own land - one seldom does. It would have been an outside group that named them - possibly Libyans, Assyrians or Greeks. "Ethiopia" is a great example of that, which was named by the Greeks. Originally assumed to mean the "land of burnt faces", but in actual fact turned out it meant something more like "Fiery eyed" or "Keen of vision". I turns out the Greeks held the Ethiopians (ancient Kush, or any land south of Egypt) in very high regard. Ref.
Sudan, on the other hand, despite being home to some of the darkest-skinned people on the planet, does also have the darkest of soils - especially in the south. Arabic speaking people that named the land "Sudan" may have been referring to either. Mind you, it's also interesting to know that that the term applied to a huge chunk of Africa south of the Sahara at first, before it became used for a specific country after European colonisation.
In several Nigerian languages, the therm "black land" is also ambiguously used in both scenarios. In Yoruba for instance, the term "Ilẹdu" (Ilẹ dudu) [ilẹ = land, dudu = black] means humus soil which is black or dark brown. This matches perfectly with the definition of "Kemet" in this book. However it also means "Land of Black People", referring to the skin. In recent times, the terms have been disambiguated by using "Ilẹ Adulawọ" to mean "Land of Black-skinned people".
Ok, that was a bit of a tangent. If you pay close attention to the photos showing the book store, the word "next" appears to the "Bugs" titled book. It is indeed the next one that I will be reading, followed by the Dinosaur one. I don't know enough about bugs or Dinos, so I probably won't be spotting any potential non-facts :)
These books remind me of when I was between 10 and 13 when I used to read those Jehova's Witnesses Booklets that where dropped through the letterbox after we'd ignored their knocking for long enough. Like the JW booklets, they're bright and colourful and pleasant to look at, even on a tablet screen.
What are you reading? Do you read on a Kindle or Tablet or are you a paper book person?
In case you're wandering what I was listening to in that photo, it's the album Diamond Days by Eric Bibb
🎧 Playlist of All Songs
Peace & Love,
Adé