(no subject)

[coraa]

Over the past couple of months, I have seen several ugly reminders that racism is alive and well. I just don't see it a whole lot because I'm, you know, a middle-class white woman. I don't have to look if I don't want to, and that's a privilege.

But that doesn't mean that it's not my responsibility to do what I can. So, some promises:

* I am going to do my best to call out racism when I see it. Even if it's my friends doing it. Even if it hurts. Some days I'll have more energy for it than others, but... I already call out sexist speech, and it's short-sighted (and privileged) in the extreme for me to only stand up about things that affect me personally. In other words: I will do my best to be an ally, in whatever small way I can.

* I am going to participate in 50books_poc, the pledge to read 50 books by people of color during the year. (I'm already up to, hm, let's see -- six, I think -- so it's feasible.) I'm not counting manga, not because they're not legitimate books written by non-white people, but because I can read a volume of a manga in twenty minutes, so it isn't much of a challenge to read 50. I may do a secondary challenge to read 25 manga, too. Why do this? Because it's easy for an American reading books in English put out by an American publisher to read very little besides white people just by accident -- so it's worth putting the extra effort in to make sure I'm reading diverse voices. If that sounds cool to you, I encourage you to join! If your reading rate is too slow for 50 to be feasible, you can always pledge to do 50 in two years or something -- that's not too uncommon either.

And if you see me acting in a way that's racist, please call me out, too. (Or sexist, heterocentrist, etc., it's just that those are easier for me to see myself.) I am so far from perfect that it's not funny, but I'm trying.

And if you have any recommendations for books by non-white authors, I would love to hear them!

Comments

All my books are packed, but ...

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Anything by Toni Morrison is guaranteed to be haunting and beautiful.

And I've only read a tidbit of it, but I think you'd REALLY enjoy Maya Angelou's Halleluja! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes. It's exactly what it sounds like -- a memoir and cookbook.

Re: All my books are packed, but ...

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, yes, that does sound right up my alley! Going right on the wishlist.

And thank you for the other recs -- I've been meaning to read both Hurston and Morrison, and this is a perfect time to actually do that.

Re: All my books are packed, but ...

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Also, M. Butterfly (Asian American author). It's a shortie.

Re: All my books are packed, but ...

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Oooh! Octavia Butler.

Man, maybe I should do a POC reading list myself (I'm looking over all these comments and it's pretty exciting).

You know, over the summer or ... when I'm retired.

Re: All my books are packed, but ...

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Putting together my own reading list has been a blast. I hope you'll have the time to do one of your own at some point!

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Octavia Butler! It is double plus good, because SHE is a BLACK author writing sci-fi! Can't get much more p.c. than that.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention it -- I just finished Seed to Harvest (the compilation of Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark and Wild Seed), and I really liked it, though it was painful in places. Lilith's Brood and Fledgeling are also both on my to-read list.

[sthaddeus.livejournal.com]

If you can find it, Bloodchild is a great collection of stories.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oh, that looks really interesting. Thank you!

[linley.livejournal.com]

Seconding the recommendation of Toni Morrison. Also Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera). Jorge Luis Borges. James Baldwin. ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere), Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Zadie Smith (White Teeth).

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

And if you go to San Antonio (I highly recommend it-- San Antonio is a neat city) you can see Sandra Cisneros's house-- it is purple! But the city really doesn't have the balls to tell her to re-paint it, even though it offended the historic King William neigborhood
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Den/1151/cisneros/houseguenther.htm

I think it is pretty (but what do I know-- I painted mine bright red), you can see a picture of it her's here
http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/mcquien/htmlfils/cisneros.htm

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, Borges.

[sthaddeus.livejournal.com]

Samuel R. Delany. Nova is a personal fave of mine. Babel-17 is good, and the stories in Aye, and Gomorrah are mostly superb. Dhalgren, Triton, and his later books are a bit heavy to be a good introduction, but might be worth a shot, although Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is good.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes, Delany. I have meant to read him for a long time; thanks for the suggestions on where to start!

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

I keep trying Dhalgren but haven't managed to stick with it for very long. I should reread Nova as a way of working up a head of steam :-)

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

I went through an Indian author phase a few years back- I remember Anita Desai being really good. I think I also read a sort of creepy book by Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) that won the Booker Prize.

Also Yukio Mishima, who had kind of wild life and I recall reading and enjoying "Death in Midsummer" for a class in high school.

I'll second linley's rec of Sandra Cisneros! Yay!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yay! Thank you.

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

Walter Mosley did an awesome group of short stories (and they're sci-fi) called Futureland, which I love.

And I'm a big fan of Michael Ondaatje. He's a poet, so his prose is positively yummy. My favorite is the English Patient, but Anil's Ghost is great too.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That looks very interesting.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Octavia Butler! Steven Barnes!

Uh, that's all i got =/

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Nobody had mentioned Steven Barnes yet, though, so useful!

[dancambull.livejournal.com]

Dick Gregory's "Nigger" is terrific, if you excuse the title, and I am sorry to put the word on your blog, but it is the title of the book (I will understand if you want to delete the comment)

Also, I know some really good Spanish play authors, but I don't know if they count. "Don Quixote" would work though.

[dancambull.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Frankie Y. Bailey, who writes mystery novels (also Criminal Justice textbooks, so don't get those)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I don't object to the use of the term to refer to a book written (and presumably titled) by a black man, so you're fine. Context is important. :)

Thank you.

[skywardprodigal.livejournal.com]

Hiya! Gregory's Nigger is fantastic. Anything by him is good.

Don Quixote, but, isn't Cervantes Spanish? A European?

[dancambull.livejournal.com]

True, Cervantes is Spanish, but I am not sure that I would call him "White." I guess it would depend on how she wants to define her minority groups.

[cwendy41.livejournal.com]

The Color of Water <- As I was reading this book, I realized that the author's brother was the health director of the city I grew up in.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Interesting.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Did you know that Alexander Dumas' grandmother was a slave? That would make him, what, a quadroon? Yet most people wouldn't necessarily associate his literature with being 'non-white' and he largely lived with the pleasures and privileges afforded to white men in his world. However, his Count of Monte Cristo has been read as a slave narrative.

I would recommend Zadie Smith White Teeth, which is a whacky tale of multi-racial Britain. I haven't enjoyed her other books, but the first one is insane and entertaining, and like nothing I have ever read before.

And why not pick up bestseller Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for an easy read and a total change of pace. The book is fascinating, if not entirely convincing, in part because some of it deals with demographics relating to race in our own time. I can't help but feel it smacks of scientism rather than science, but read it for yourself and see what you think.

I also want to raise the question, not because I disagree with your goal or am trying to pick a fight, but isn't the project of reading 50 books by non-white authors something of a biased act in and of itself?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recs!

I know others have answered this question more eloquently than me, but I'll take a stab at it: it's not "colorblind," but I don't think that means it's biased, or at least not biased in a negative way. Specifically, I don't believe that we live in a colorblind society at this point, and I think that acting as if we do (ie, acting as if I can have an unbiased selection of books by ignoring race) means that I'm going to get a lopsided view of things. By failing to seek out books by people different than me, I reliably wind up reading 80-90% middle-class white people, mostly Americans -- and that means that I'm feeding my brain one range of viewpoints, often to the exclusion of others. Left to my own devices, it's too easy to read only things that reflect and reinforce my own experience. I don't want to do that: I want to see a variety of perspectives, even (especially) those that come from backgrounds other than my own. And that's not happening by chance, so I'm going to see that it happens by choice.

As far as that goes, even with this challenge, I'd be willing to bet that half or more of the books I read this year are still by middle-class white people.

(A more eloquent explanation of why I feel it's worth -- indeed, the one that tipped me over into taking the challenge myself -- is here.)

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Oh, and because I enjoyed it and for no other reason: Gita Mehta's River Sutra.

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (though I assume any translation that you find will have been done by a white person) was enjoyable, if slow in places and not terribly novel-like.

There's also the Tale of Genji, which I keep meaning to get around to. I can't give it a hearty recommendation, for that reason, but I think you'd mentioned it at some point, too, and this can be a reminder.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about how I felt about white translators, but I think, tentatively, if the original was by a non-white person and the translation was done with some degree of respect inasmuch as I can determine that, I'm okay with it. Otherwise I'm going to cut myself out of a lot of works written by people-who-are-not-white who live in other countries and/or who wrote long ago, and I think that would be sad.

So, thank you for the reminders! (I read excerpts of Genji in college, but never the whole thing.)

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

I found No God in Sight by Altaf Tyrewala interesting. Set in Mumbai, it is vignettes of people very loosely connected to each other.

Are you interested in movies too? Gurinder Chadha did two films that I love (in completely different ways): Bend it like Beckham (a british football romantic comedy), and Bride & Prejudice (a Bollywood musical of Pride & Prejudice). And Mira Nair did Monsoon Wedding.

And someone else mentioned it, but I found Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood (first book: Dawn) very fascinating. It is the most convincing aliens and alien contact that I've ever read (and I read a lot of scifi).

Banana Yoshimoto writes neat short stories and novellas -- my favorite is Lizard, I think Matt's favorite is Asleep. She's a Japanese author. If you like the mindbending, and you want even more, you can try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

If you like children's books:
Laurence Yep -- Ribbons (San Francisco Chinese-American ballet students)
Lensey Namioka -- Yang the Youngest and his Terrible Ear (Chinese immigrants in Seattle)
Allen Say -- Tea with Milk, Grandfather's Journey, the Ink-Keepers Apprentice (loosely biographical stories)
Yoshiko Uchida -- Journey to Topaz and Journey Home (about Japanese-American internment and going home to California race riots afterwards)

And I can give you way more suggestions (if you want any more -- just email) if I open up my book database, these books were just the ones in my head. You may have noticed a theme, and yes, I do tend to read more books and watch more movies that are connected to India or Japan. And I guess my own book challenge is that I like reading books from other countries -- so if you ever have suggestions of good translations, or New Zealand authors, or what have you, I'd love that. (Or if you want some good Canadian or British books, I can probably find too many of those too.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you for the reminder -- Bride & Prejudice has been on my to-watch list for years, and the reminder to stick it on my Netflix queue is appreciated! (And I adored Bend it Like Beckham.)

The other recs are wonderful. Thank you so much. I will probably hit you up for more suggestions via email in the future as well.

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

Oh right, and all of Malcolm Gladwell is fun and interesting. (I know not everyone is a fan, but I am.) In other non-fiction, I adore Simon Singh -- both The Code Book and Fermat's Enigma for being understandable and short.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed Blink and The Tipping Point, so Outliers is also on my to-read list.

[marthawells.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you like heroic fantasy, but if you do I'd recommend Charles Saunders' series set in an alternate Africa. And I second the recommendation for Steven Barnes' SF.

I'd also recommend Laura Joh Rowland's mysteries, set in feudal Japan. (Which reminds me I should mention Barnes and Rowland on the book rec tag on my LJ.)

Oh, also Nalo Hopkinson, if you haven't read her before.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I do enjoy heroic fantasy, so thank you for the rec!

...And for the Nalo Hopkinson reminder; my housemate offered me the loan of Brown Girl in the Ring.

[avani.livejournal.com]

A bit late to the game...

I'll second the rec for Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, though it's not science fiction. I also like The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

I'm a fan of Salman Rushdie, but he's a bit of an acquired taste. I'd recommend The Satanic Verses, and I'm really looking forward to reading my copy of The Enchantress of Florence.

Um.. lessee.. it's hard to remember what authors look like. I'm sure there are tons more I'm just not thinking of that are equally deserving of mention.

I'll also put in a word for AC Clarke. Though he's a white man, he lived in and wrote from Sri Lanka for 50 years, and, coming from a related culture, I think he is the closest you'll get to a good indian science fiction writer.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've heard so much good about both Roy and Lahiri that they're both going on the list. And I've been meaning to try Rushdie for a long time.

I didn't know that about Clarke! Interesting.