I've had some questions about what "counts" as diversity. Are we looking for authors who are minorities? (That would leave out many foreign authors)
Are we looking for authors who are foreign, or immigrants? Children of immigrants? (That would rule out Native Americans and many black authors)
Does it have to be a book that somehow emphasizes the person's different-ness from the reader? Ralph Nader, for example, is first generation Lebanese-American, but that may not be obvious to readers of his books on public safety and politics. So do we count The Seventeen Traditions, in which he talks about his childhood, but not In Pursuit of Justice?
Nobody has asked about Lisa See, unless you count me asking myself. She's only 1/8 Chinese and she looks caucasian. But, she grew up in L.A.'s Chinatown and her work contains Chinese themes. She self-identifies as Chinese-American, but she's less Chinese than I am Italian or German, and I don't self-identify as either of those. Does she count?
If a reader commits to 6 books and yet leaves out black authors, are they being sufficiently diverse? On the other hand, what if they commit to only black authors? What if they love Toni Morrison and have read every one of her books except A Mercy? Can they count that, or does it have to be an author who's new to them?
Here are my answers: yes, yes, yes, maybe, maybe, maybe, probably not, probably not, no, yes.
But I'm asking each of you to challenge yourselves, which means that ultimately you have to be the one to answer these questions to your satisfaction. Asking ourselves the hard questions about who we choose to read and why, is an integral part of the challenge.
So, it's your turn: In what way are you hoping to stretch yourself with this challenge, and what do you consider sufficiently diverse?
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4 comments:
We're in at A Year of Reading (www.readingyear.blogspot.com). Not sure exactly which challenge we'll commit to yet but we are definitely in! Our focus will be children's books most likely. As soon as we post about the challenge, I'll leave the link here. Thanks for putting this out there for all of us.
I'm so glad you posted this. I was just discussing this with my husband as I made my choices. I looked at the list of books I am already committed to read this year and found authors who are: African (2), Japanese (1), Chinese-American (1), Latina (1), African-American (1), Jamaican (1). I was excited to find that my reading list was already this diverse. It might be even more-so, but I stopped researching after seven. I'll be signing up for this challenge later today.
Franki, I'm working on the children's titles and can definitely use more suggestions there, so if you have some ideas please share them!
Alyce, I love hearing that you and your husband were discussing some of these same issues. You don't have to have all your books decided (or researched) before signing up, so go ahead and sign up any time!
I am looking forward to finding new authors. I like the books you mentioned in your previous post on Historical Fiction and I am going to put most of them on my list. I've been reading mostly kids and YA books for the past many years so I think for me the challenge will be to catch up on adult titles even as I try to somehow keep up with the kid's books. Don't know how I'll accomplish that actually... But it will be fun trying!
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