LIFE: Summer reading: What's really making our handbags so heavy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" stuck with us in such a significant way after we finished reading it, we're now immersed in an Africa literary moment. So we picked up her debut novel, "Purple Hibiscus," ("Yellow" is her second), which, so far, seems to offer a compelling allegory of the affects of colonialism through a teenage girl's observations of her abusive father's hold on her family. "What is the What," by Dave Eggers, meanwhile, has managed to grab us in a chokehold and freak us out from the very first line. It's also opening our eyes to the differences in the way Africans and African-Americans perceive each other.