30 Days of Book Talk discussion

Perhaps a strange question since most of the world consists of people of color, but in the U.S. the typical reading material seems to be disproportionately white. What are your favorite books written by authors of color?

Here are some of mine:

The House of the Spirits has been a favorite since college but as with most of my favorites, I'm a little afraid to re-read it now. A great story of three generations of women in Chile. I've really enjoyed everything of Allende's that I've read.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a fantastic book about life and civil war in 1960's Nigeria, from three very different perspectives. I haven't liked Adichie's other fiction as much (or at all in some cases), but this one is amazing.

A Suitable Boy is a great epic of 1950s India - about as long as War and Peace but it covers a ton of ground and is definitely worth it.

Over the last few years I've read far less fantasy than I used to, and Sofia Samatar has been the one author whose work has consistently wowed me. Her writing is much more literary than is usual in the genre. I especially loved her short story collection, Tender, which even made me love some sci-fi stories (which I usually hate).

I'll end this with a great civil rights era memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi. It's very much worth reading for the intersection of personal experience and the political, but it also comes across as very real in a way that stands the test of time well.

As I mentioned in the "currently-reading" post, I am reading "Unmarriageable" by Pakistani author Soniah Kamal & I totally enjoy the cultural, Punjabi-Muslim cultural aspects of the book that add fresh spice and meaning to the book as a P&P retelling: food, clothes, history, literature, religious ceremonies, what have you.

It reminds me of the film-musical "Bride and Prejudice", which is also a Punjabi version, just set on the other side of the border, India, Amritsar.

I have been trying my best to educate myself about the racial discussion that is going on presently in the world, and even though my studies are in no way complete, I think I am among the critics of the term “people of colour”. Not because of any sense of political correctness, which I think always desensitises the issue and clouds the truth, but because it is a very vague and crude way of putting matters. White is a colour after all as someone in the internet put it succinctly and also skin colour itself isn’t the denominator in this way of grouping. And even though I personally don’t feel or understand why it is considered derogatory yet, there are many who feel offended by the term. They say it’s a way to group people who are not of European ancestors. But I personally think this way of grouping has more to do with cultural and religious issues. Because South Americans like the Argentines or Chileans eg. Isabel Allende, are of European ancestry as well yet are categorised amongst people of colour. I would very much like to know your views as well. Are there other perspectives and connotations that I’m missing or not understanding? Or misunderstanding?

While there may be a general idea behind "people of colour" I also struggle with this, because there is also a difference depending on our own heritage/language.

E.g. in Hungary, when we use the expression, "people of colour", we actually refer to peple of AfroAmerican/African origin.

For other people, we use the georgraphical term "Asian", "Arab", South-American. I intentionally mention the politically correct versions only

It very much pains me to say that the majority of Hungarians have views what is considred highly racist and rightly so. :(
Present goverment encourages them to go on thinking like that as well as proclaiming that we are so much better than everyone else and have the right to look down on everyone else. Add some religious fundamentalism to that and..... *SIGH*

I just hate this attitude. While it's absolutely ok to be proud of your roots/culture, I think being born into any race is not a virtue, it's simply a state or fact. It's what you personally make if it that counts.

The more I think about this issue, the more it seems to me that the way it is being particularly addressed today, is an American issue. The rest of us have our own problems and that is why the language barrier becomes so excruciatingly difficult at times to cross at times like this. We all think we are talking about the same thing, but that thing has different meanings for each of us.

By the way the problem I have with political correctness is that it has always seemed to me to be like a patch they stick on anything that doesn’t look nice, but the problematic root of what they don’t like remains under the patch and actually thrives. For me and the way I understand the matter being polite vs. being rude is different from being politically correct vs. being politically insensitive. which in reality is called being rude actually. Many intelligent people use political correctness as a tool to further their own agendas which at core are against the fronts and facades they show the world. At least it’s like that in my corner of the world. Even though they don’t use the exact same term for it.

I too believe it is what we make of ourselves that counts. But I think along the way being humane, fair and polite and kind, and refining ourselves at every step is what will rescue our species.

The Street
Tide Running
Killer Tune
Version Control
Jazz
Wild Seed
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Seraph on the Suwanee
Rattlebone
Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Survived Slavery and Became Millionaires
Parable of the Sower
Running Hot

Terminology is a moving target, it’s true.

Alexandre Dumas pere, Isabel Wilkerson, Lily Chin (she writes knitting/crochet books), Louise Erdrich, Lisa See.

I've been on a Book from Every Country mission for a long time now. I'm on Bulgaria, so clearly it hasn't been going very fast.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

But it has exposed me to a lot of non-American and non-white authors. It's also made me realize that a lot of countries don't have much interest in novels. For example, in Azerbaijan, almost all reading material is poetry. In other countries, the authors who write or are translated into English are Western educated, and it feels like they were writing with a Western audience in mind. In the Caribbean in particular, even though the subject matter in the books I picked was specific to the country, the literary forms tended to be extremely familiar to an American reader.

The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden (Bhutan) is one of the most challenging books I've read. It's not complicated to read - the story is very straightforward, but... it's hard to explain. Everywhere that you would expect a Western narrative to take a certain turn never happens. Things just happen, they don't have more meaning or narrative arc. The way that Buddhism manifests in the main character's life requires a truly deep internalized belief that this life isn't the end of one's karmic journey to feel at all satisfying. There's never any resolution to past events. It's a-psychological. I'm used to being able to put myself in a character's shoes, even if their beliefs are very different from my own, but this one I just couldn't do it.

Runner up on "this was not a Western ending" although the author is white just not Western: Live Until Dawn by Vasil Bykaŭ (Belarus) is about a WWII soldier who skis all night to get to a German encampment, discovers the Germans have already moved, is too tired to go on, so lies down in the middle of the road to die, knowing another German battalion will be coming along to kill him if he doesn't die of exposure first. The end. So, my husband is from Belarus and he said - yeah, that sounds like Belarussian literature.

Molly, I'm impressed that you're reading in alphabetical order! For my challenge I just read whatever strikes my fancy at the moment.

I tried to read The Circle of Karma but bounced off of it. Later on I read Choden's Tales in Colour: And Other Stories and thought it was great, so I feel like I should give the novel another try. Maybe the stories were more westernized but they didn't feel distant or difficult to understand at all.

I very much enjoyed Girl, Woman, Other of Bernardine Evaristo last year and am now reading Anton de Kom’s his polemic against colonial rule in Surinam (one of the colonies of The Netherlands).

Some of my favorites:

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Xenowealth Books by Tobias S. Buckell
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
Conservation of Shadows and Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

N.K. Jemisin bar none for me. Amazing author!
Malcolm Gladwell. I have just about read all of his nonfiction.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.
Lawrence Hill. Loved The Book of Negroes.