*grump*

[annwfyn]

So, I'm slowly working through the 'Read 50 books by PoC Authors in a Year Challenge'. This means reading a lot more books. I wander into Waterstones, looking for said books. I find a lovely big bookshelf entitled 'Black authors'. I think 'this is fab', and I pick out an interesting looking novel called 'White Oleander', which I've vaguely heard of. It sounds interesting.

I come back to work, and go online to add it to my list of books I'm reading for the challenge. I pause, just before adding it, and decide to check that the writer is definitely a PoC.

She isn't.

Why that book got shelved with 'Black authors', I've no idea. I'm now feeling all stroppy and grumpy. At least the book does look interesting and wasn't one of my insane literary experiments.

Does anyone have any good recs for non-white authored books, of any genre, that they would like to pass on to me to brighten my day?

Comments

[ksirafai.livejournal.com]

I've got a book by the author of Wild Seed sitting in my library-stack at home, if you want to nick that? Otherwise, I'll inspect Peckham Library, for IIRC, it has a chunk of books that are publicised in this fashion... :)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Octavia Butler would be fab, and I totally bow to your great library-fu!

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

How are we defining non-white?

[ginasketch.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming not completely Caucasion?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Non-caucasian.

Fair skinned PoC are allowed. Basically, if they are not of White European descent, they count, I believe.

[ginasketch.livejournal.com]

One of my favorites. Also very similar to my childhood experience of growing up in Belize

http://www.amazon.com/Beka-Lamb-Caribbean-Writers-Edgell/dp/0435988441

[anonymous-james.livejournal.com]

Excuse me for being dense, but isn't this a little odd? (I'm avoiding the word rascist here because I don't mean to be that severe).

I mean when I read a book, I don't check to see whether the author is white or black. Now admittedly I'm leaving it up to the publishing company to also be not bothered by this, but for all I know half the writers I read books from already could be non-white.

Clearly I've missed the point somewhere...

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I think the point is to use ethnicity as a proxy for broader lifestyle differences. It's a reasonable arbitrary constraint to impose if you want to read about viewpoints that probably differ from your own.

Personally, if I want to read the works of someone with a different perspective to mine, I'll just read something I disagree with. Still, each to their own.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think the point is that it's really easy to read books by white authors. Like...really easy. You can spend your entire life reading books by white authors without even trying, or stepping out of your comfort zone. And it's a lot easier for white authors to get published. At the end of the day, books are picked by editors and publishers who respond to them, and often people respond to characters and stories which resonate with them - with lead characters which are just like them. It's why male writers have traditionally had an easier time getting published as well.

That also tends to mean that if you're white it's easier to find books with characters who are just like you - in fantasy, for example, 99% of the novels feature white european style heroes, in western european style settings. There's a real shortage of characters who are identifiably of non-white descent, and that's a shame for a lot of readers, who are always reading about people Not Like Them, whereas I get to read constantly about People Like Me.

So, the point of this challenge is to step out of that comfort zone, to stop reading all white authors, just because I've not thought about it and also to try and stretch myself a little and read books about people who are not Just Like Me - for example, I've read books about immortal Africans, and the slave trade as part of this challenge. I've read books about Bangladeshi women coming to England and I've read books about African economics by an African economist talking about her own country. And I think that has stretched my mind at lot.

It isn't as if I'm not reading any white authors any more - and god knows I've read enough of them. I'm just also trying something different and not quietly letting my world stay white-by-default.

[badgersandjam.livejournal.com]

Anything by Toni Morrison. Beloved is most people's choice, but I've heard really good things about her latest one as well (and it has the bonus of being much shorter).

Maya Angelou. Poetry and Prose (are you allowed poetry)?

Wild Swans by Jung Chang.

Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan.

collections by Sherman Alexie (I may have spelt that wrongly).

Falling Leaves by Adeline Yeh Mah.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (this is *really* good)

various novels by Louise Erdrich.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker (non-fiction)

There is a collection of Native American stories and excerpts edited by Joy Harjo called Reinventing the Enemy's Language

If you're allowed poetry, check out Joy Harjo (especially She Had Some Horses, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker (Horses make the Landscape look more Beautiful). (IMHO Lorde and Harjo are better poets than Walker.)

Erm...that's all I can bring to mind just at the moment without my bookshelves and dedicated search time on my hands.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I am allowed poetry, but I've tried Maya Angelou before and she makes my brain bleed. Alice Walker as well, I'm afraid. 'The Colour Purple' sapped my will to live.

Jung Chang, Sherman Alexie, and Adeline Yeh Mah are all fab and I've got a fair chunk of my bookshelf already, although I always want more! Maxine Hong Kingston is in the post, apparently. I've heard good things about that novel!

Who is Linda Hogan? I've heard the name, but can't place where...

[badgersandjam.livejournal.com]

Oh! Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, too.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I'm reading 'Brick Lane' at the moment!

[ksirafai.livejournal.com]

Also, and because I Can, this (www.themedicinewheel.net/).

Native American counts, right? :)

[ksirafai.livejournal.com]

www.themedicinewheel.net/

Bother this LJ linking things. :)

[rocket-jockey.livejournal.com]

Someone already mentioned Sherman Alexie, but I'd second that one.

Langston Hughes - African American jazz-era poet

Richard Wright - African American "radical era" novelist

Cao Xuequin - classical Chinese novelist, "Dream of the Red Chamber" is considered one of the best Chinese novels ever written

Natsume Soseki - Japanese novelist, early 20th C.

Isabel Allende - Peruvian-American novelist, a prime example of "magical realism"

Azar Nafsi - Persian novelist/memoirist best known for "Reading Lolita in Tehran"

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've read some Sherman Alexie and think he is a god among men.

The rest are all mostly new to me, so I shall definitely have to poke.

[wildrogue.livejournal.com]

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini. I can't recommend it highly enough.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I read plenty of nonfiction books written by scientific academia. This is because I appreciate the overall format and discipline with which their authors have been taught to write.

Now, scientific academia is probably a more ethnically diverse field than, say, historical fiction writing, considerably moreso if you class people of Jewish descent as non-white. As a result, I can point to a lot of books written by people of non-white origins, but their ethnicity is largely immaterial as far as their published status goes.

It can be pertinent to what they're talking about (of the two examples cited earlier, Malcolm Gladwell often talks about race, and Naseem Taleb goes on about growing up in wartorn Lebanon a fair bit), but their ethnicities are essentially interchangeable window dressing in the context of the bulk of their written works.

So I could point you in the direction of several good books on economics by non-white authors, but by happenstance the better books on economics which I'd recommend first, on their own merits, are written by white people. They'd all tell you that correlation doesn't imply causality, though. Apart from Taleb; he's a bloody nutter.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Jewish doesn't count, just by virtue of being Jewish, although obviously there are non-white Jews.

Randomly, academia isn't actually very diverse. There are some shocking statistics about the number of afro-caribbean students who get into Oxbridge for an undergrad degree, let alone further. This might be linked to class - normally academia is a very middle class area, for the cost alone if nothing else. And it's getting worse...

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

In case you've not got enough suggestions yet . . . maybe try something by James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room and Another Country I've both enjoyed, the latter deals more with differing racial perspectives

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

New suggestions are always good! Added to my list. Thank you. :)

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

Haruki Murakami - writes deeply weird Japanese tales, I especially enjoyed his Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Do comics count?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Yes, comics do count, although I don't read nearly so many of them.

[oddnumbereven.livejournal.com]

Why hello; I am LJ stalking you from TLL, and reading your 50booksPOC posts kinda make me want to fangirl you like mad.

So - I hope none of these have come up already, they haven't from what I can see. Oh, and I second Peckham lib as a great place to find Black writing, it's a rad library in general.

- Possibly OP, Zhang Jie is a Chinese writer I picked up in a 2nd hand store, her short stories As Long As Nothing happens, Nothing Will Happen, are great.

- Goodbye, Tsugumi (or anything) by Banana Yoshimoto - a spare, almost surreal short novel.

- the Aya comics (Aya & Aya of Yop City)by Marguerite Abouet, I love these and have rec'd them to so many people. They're fun, and the artwork so pretty, set in a close-knit community in the Cote d'Ivoire of the 1970s.

- I read an anthology called Opening Spaces: New African Women's Writing, ed. Yvonne Vera, which had some great new authors for me to check out. Keep an eye out for anything under the AWS imprint.

- Graceland by Chris Abani - not the easiest read, but a very rewarding one.


- A colleague is currently over the moon reading R.K. Narayan.

P.S. While Waterstones is to blame for much fail, the categorisation of WO may not be their fault - the database they use is fed through from publishing info, lots of strange gaps and mistakes come through as well. Like Virginia Woolf's essays being classified as 'Black/Asian Fiction' (I have seen it with mine own eyes!)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked my reviews, and thank you for the recs. :) I shall investigate Peckham Library forthwith!