I’ve finally seen a book meme I liked enough to post on Rat’s Reading.
- Name the last book by a female author that you’ve read
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.
- Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you’ve read
- Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson. Though Ms. Hopkinson is a black Canadian, not American, I’m going to include her anyway.
- Name one from a Latino/a author
- Solstice by Ulises Silva, though I didn’t finish the book.
Slicky Boys by Martin Limón, way back in September 2006 was the last book by a Latino that I finished. Been a while.I forgot about Isabel Allende. I read one of her books last year. - How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?
- Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh, though most folks don’t really think of Palestinians as Asian. Return to the Middle Kingdom by Yuan-tsung Chen is the most recent by someone from east or south Asia.
- What about a GLBT writer?
- Nalo Hopkinson is a queer writer, so she qualifies for this answer as well the the other. Perry Moore’s Hero if I can’t count the same person/book twice.
- Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you’re feeling lucky?
- Raja Shehadeh again. I’ve actually got a few others in the category in the last year. I am not counting Michael Muhammad Knight even, as he is a white American despite identifying himself as a muslim.
- Any other “marginalized” authors you’ve read lately?
- Michael Chabon is Jewish. While Jews are certainly marginalized in lots of respects, I’m not sure if they can be considered marginalized in literature. I read Sherman Alexie last year, he being of native American descent.
- Do you read non-fiction regularly? Do you read it in a different way or place than you read fiction?
- I read a fair amount of non-fiction. Nine books so far this year. That’s actually below my pace compared to fiction. Until last year, I was reading about one non-fiction book for every two books of fiction. I’m running at less than 25% for the year so far.
Despite the ease with which I could answer most of these, I do not actually read minority authors in anything resembling their population proportion in the United States. And definitely not the entire world. I don’t intend to ever try to match world population, but I have been making an effort to increase the diversity of my authors. Hopefully enough to resemble the U.S. population someday fairly soon.
Image Pentecost Ske language by Flickr user yumievriwan used under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Nd 2.0 license.
