Reading and Race

Earlier this year I stumbled, via the Feminist Science Fiction blog, upon a massive debate about race in fantasy and speculative fiction. I hadn't really thought about representation in SF before, so that was a good kick in the pants... but more importantly, I hadn't thought about the way much fantasy is based around something like medeival English culture. Keyword English. Those taverns, the travellers on horses, the lords and ladies and kings and queens and so on. It was this particular blog entry by deepad on livejournal, which really interested me. (Please do read it, but I have to ask you not to comment on it if you do disagree... the author has had more than enough negative comments to deal with already.)

Being, as I am, a white person of the Celt-blend variety, I never really realized that it's a privilege to look at fantasy novels and see settings that I can relate to as being similar to where my ancestors, if you were to look far enough back, came from. So I took a look at the links radiating from that entry and read bits of the discussion that it was part of, and particlarly I ended up looking at this LJ community, which challenges members to read 50 books by people of colour, and some other book challenges, and through other avenues around the same time I found Carleen Brice's blog, White Readers Meet Black Authors. The same topic came up on Editorial Ass, a blog I follow.

So all of this talk about reading challenges and introductions and affirmative action in reading choices made me wonder... How many books by people of colour did I read last year? The answer is eight. Eight out of sixty is pretty bad. I don't want to aim at a number of books, but I've decided to limit books by white writers to half of my reading this year. So if I read sixty books again this year, thirty of them will have been by people of colour.

Here's my list so far. I'm only at 4 out of 13, even though I've been thinking about it as I make my book choices. But I have 9 more months to make it up! If you're a reader, I encourage you to have a look at what you're reading. Unfortunately, if you stroll into a bookstore or a library, there will be more books by white writers than writers of colour, and that leaves us with this lame unbalanced fictional worldview. I've already really enjoyed some books I might otherwise not have read because of my goal this year. And I'm barely started.

But, without further ado, my reading from January-March 2009!

George R. R. Martin - A Storm of Swords (audiobook)
Michael Crichton - Prey
Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
Jodi Picoult - The Pact
Amy Bloom - Away
George R. R. Martin - A Feast for Crows (audiobook)
Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner
Larissa Behrendt - Home
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Kim Edwards - The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas
April Sinclair - I Left My Back Door Open
Helen Neff - Accident of Birth