50books_poc

I've only read nine since my previous post, but discovered that one author I had already read fits this community.

Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler - essential reading

Search for a New Somali Identity, by Hussein Ali Dualeh - memoir of a senior political figure

From One To Zero: A Universal History of Numbers, by Georges Ifrah - fascinating

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston - interesting memoir of life as a Chinese girl growing up in California

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan - a great sf anthology

Jewel, by Beverly Jenkins - nineteenth-century romance

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi - a brilliant book about literature in a society which is closing itself up

Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi - graphic novel about life in Austria and Iran

Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine - a character study of a young Japanese-American (graphic novel)

32 Stories, by Adrian Tomine - Tomine's early work, a collection of short stories (graphic format)

12 and 13. Knife Edge and Checkmate by Malorie Blackman

I can't talk about these sequels to Noughts and Crosses without hugely spoilering that book, so don't read on if you want to be surprised. 

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 14. The First Century After Beatrice by Amin Maalouf

Scientists develop a way to make sure couples have a boy, but it's irreversible, and there's no girl drug available to counteract its cumulative effect on the world's population.

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 15. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

 Butler's been so extensively reviewed I feel like there's not much point to adding my two cents, but for what its worth, this is an extremely believable and compelling post-apocalyptic tale about a young woman Lauren, her family and then her chosen family, trying to make a good life in the ruin.

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13. River's Daughter, by Tasha Campbell (kittikattie)

I thought this was a lovely, simple story, with a sense of rootedness that many stories lack (rootedness in the land, in nature, in a culture where characters truly belong). I loved how the river was the protagonist's connection to her people and her true identity.

The ending threw me off balance a bit - I didn't expect the protagonist to kill one of her oppressors to ensure that the townspeople remained afraid of the river so that they would leave her people alone. I expected the book to end with her finding freedom, being content just to have escaped. But I could understand how violence could be required to keep the oppressors away.

14. Does My Head Look Big In This?, by Randa Abdel-Fattah

I kind of had to make myself keep reading this book. The protagonist got on my nerves - I dislike books about girly girls who are focused on boys, pop culture, shopping, their appearance, etc.

I warmed to her more in the second half of the book, when the focus was more on serious issues, and I didn't mind finishing it. But I still wouldn't read it again.

'Jupiter Williams' is a young adult novel, set in the 18th century, and based around the character of Jupiter Williams, a young African boy at a boarding school for young Africans in Clapham. His family are important people in Sierra Leone, and he and his brother have been sent over to England to be educated. However, whilst they are there, his younger brother goes missing and so Jupiter has to go and find him.

This book is a wonderful exploration of London in the 18th century, and specifically of Black London in this time period, which is a subject that is horribly under-explored. It's also, I thought, a really interesting look at the intersection of class and race. Jupiter runs into horrible numbers of problems because of his race - both Black and White folk alike assume he is a runaway slave, he is at constant risk of being kidnapped for the slave trade - but equally it's made clear that he starts off the novel as a pretty privileged and sheltered young man in some ways, because of the wealth and status of his family, and he does treat other people quite badly because of that in some ways.

I started off not really expecting to like this book - it's a boys school story, which I've not been that fond of in the past, and all the main characters are male which is also often a turn off for me. However, I actually found myself really getting drawn in, and wound up reading the whole book in a single sitting. I liked Jupiter as a character hugely. He is flawed, he can be stupid, he's cocky and blind to so much, but he's also so human and so teenage. I found myself wanting things to work out for him, and really hated the way the world kept throwing more and more crap at it, most of which was solely because he was an African boy alone in London.

The only objection I had to this book was the ending. I'm hoping there's a sequel out there, because the ending did leave so much hanging, but I've a horrible feeling that there isn't, and that's a shame.

10. Skim, by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Somehow, this book didn't resonate with me as much as it did with others here. I'm not sure why; it is beautifully done, and it seems like the kind of book that I would love. But it didn't quite do it for me.

11. Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine

I had mixed reactions to this one. On the one hand, a lot of things about the characters made me twitch. On the other hand, it examines honestly the issues of race and attraction and what contemporary American culture conditions us to find attractive. And there are a lot of queer women, portrayed for the most part realistically. It's just... eh.

One thing that I found amusing: the protagonist tears into his ex-girlfriend for dating a white man, and she protests that he's actually half Jewish and half Native American. I'm a quarter each, and have never encountered that combination in fiction before (or anywhere, really).

12. Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans, by Ronald Laird and Taneshia Nash Laird, illustrated by Elihu "Adofo" Bey

This book traces the history of African-Americans from the early 17th century to the election of Barack Obama. It is absolutely packed with information: the authors try to squeeze four centuries of history into 217 pages, so it feels like information is whizzing by at a breakneck speed.

This is the second edition; the first edition was published in 1997. The second edition includes 13 more pages about history from 1997 to now. (There's an obvious break between the original pages and the added pages: the handwriting in the new pages looks different, the lines are thinner, and the characters look subtly different. It looks a little less carefully planned.)

The history is told by two narrators, a man and a woman - who sometimes have different opinions about the events they're recounting. I think doing it this way, as opposed to attempting to tell the history "objectively," allowed the narrative to be deeply centered in the black point(s) of view: they could talk about "us," make value judgments, show the unity and diversity of opinion. For those who are used to the dominant white-centered narrative of US history, I think this would represent a radical recentering; for me, it was interesting because I'm used to Native American critique and recentering of that narrative, so this recentering was alike-but-different. It felt to me like some parts were missing - but it also felt like it included other parts that I was missing.

All in all, I recommend it. But look elsewhere for in-depth treatment of the events depicted.


Edit: I keep breaking the tagging system...

Gods, I've been awful. I don't think I've written a review in months, probably because I've not been reading much. Anyway, just to make up for my long silence, here are two reviews together.

The Wind Done Gone

I bought 'The Wind Done Gone' because I thought it was a re-telling of 'Gone With The Wind' from the point of view of Cynara, Scarlett's biracial half sister. In fact, it is more of a sequal - the book starts after Rhett Butler (referred to as 'R' throughout the novel) has left Scarlett, and most of the novel takes place after the Civil War, through Reconstruction, with flashbacks to earlier events.

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Overall, a really good and emotional read. Highly recommended.

Ten Things I Hate About Me

This is a novel by the same writer of 'Does My Head Look Big In This', and is another novel about being a Muslim and a teenage girl in Australia.

( Read more... )

Another really good book. Definitely recommended.

Title: Birth of a Nation
Author: Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker
Number of Pages: 137 pages
My Rating: 4/5

When the mostly-black residents of East St. Louis are prevented from voting due to a "glitch" that lists them all as felons, they demand a recount. When all they get is an apology, they do the unthinkable: secede from the United States.

This was recommended to me when I posted about Truth: Red, White & Black, also illustrated by Kyle Baker. To be honest, the summary didn't grab me all that much, but I figured what the hell, why not? and put it on my wishlist. Not like graphic novels take long to read anyway.

I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I anticipated. The writing's great and I was laughing at something on practically every page. And Baker's art works a lot better here than it did in Truth, where his cartoony artwork felt a little out of place.

One thing I didn't really like was the format. It's not a comic book, or even a series of comic strips. Neither is it a text story with illustrations. It's kind of a weird hybrid, with panels laid out like a comic, but with the narration and dialogue (mostly dialogue) underneath each panel, and I found it kind of hard to follow sometimes.

Mooch on BookMooch.

21. Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
I liked this a lot. The family curse appealed to me, as did geeky, fat, Nice Guy, wannabe-writer Oscar. I hated what happened to Oscar, but it was believably told. I loved the explanation of Trujillo's dictatorship in terms of the Silmarillion.

22. Nnedi Okorafor Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker
I was excited when I saw this because it's young enough that I could think about giving it to my niece. I'm always looking for good books for her, and the more strong, nontraditional female characters and characters of colour, the better. Sadly, Zahrah the Windseeker is a bit too old for my niece, who's seven. I'll try her on it when she's nine or ten. This book is wonderful. I wasn't too grabbed at first, but Zahrah's character development pulled me in. She's very different at the end of the book to how she was at the beginning. And what a likeable character! I also love the concept of dadi, and the plant-computers. And, I am not surprised at all to say, it passes Bechdel.

23. Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Living (translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, photographs by Ian Cumming)
This is not what I expected when I put a book by the Dalai Lama on reserve at the library. It's a coffee table book. Full of lush and rather objectifying pictures of Tibetan people participating in religious ceremonies. I was hoping for some solid information on Tibetan liberation and Buddhism. Instead I got... well, there was lots of entry-level information on Buddhism, packaged so as to be as non-threatening to non-Buddhists as possible, and lots of glossy photographs. Definitely a case where I should have chosen the book much more carefully.

Request: Can anyone recommend a good book on the PRC's occupation of Tibet? Written by a Tibetan author would be ideal, but I'll take whatever's good and factual. And if it's not a complete hagiography of the Dalai Lama, so much the better.

#20: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Gladwell examines how human beings process information to make decisions and how split-second decisions (made in a "blink", by a process he calls "thin-slicing") differ from decisions made at more length. It's certainly on the anecdotal and episodic side, feeling rather like a set of magazine articles pulled together, but it's generally an interesting read nonetheless.

Gladwell looks at both the good and bad sides of thin-slicing: on one hand, an art forgery is correctly detected by experts making quick judgments, but on the other, cops in the Bronx make a tragically wrong snap judgment based on race and kill an innocent victim. In fact, I thought the parts about race and unconscious prejudice were the best in the book, and I liked Gladwell's conclusion: that it's our responsibility not only to acknowledge making these judgments, but also to act to fix the inequities caused by them.


#21: Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband

Pursuing her life calling as a doctor in India in the late nineteenth century, Bryony Asquith believes she has left behind her failed marriage and her ex-husband, Leo Marsden. When Leo shows up unexpectedly to bring an appeal from her sister to return to England and their ailing father, Bryony feels compelled to go with Leo. Their journey home is much more dangerous than they thought it would be, though: in addition to confronting a revolt, they must confront the deep emotions which led to the break-up of their marriage.

I really loved Leo and Bryony (especially Bryony) and their justifiably messed-up relationship, and as in previous books, Thomas handles the flashback structure very well. There were a lot of things I didn't like, though, and they almost overcame what I did. There's a particular element to their past sexual relationship I found troubling, and I couldn't tell if Thomas meant it to be problematic or not, because Bryony and Leo never really address it. Also, I was very disappointed that the book is set almost entirely in India, yet there are no Indian characters (save for a couple of soldiers). Also also, the romance is resolved about three-quarters of the way through, yet the book keeps going; the last part in England just seemed completely unnecessary to me.

Thomas' characters always seem to pull me through her weak plotting, but I do hope the next book is better in that department (which I think is what I said about her first two books, unfortunately).

Min Fong Ho is an American author of Chinese descent who grew up in Thailand.  Her story Hush! is evocative of her childhood home outside Bangkok which was, as she describes it on her web page, "an airy house next to a fishpond and a big garden, with rice fields, where water buffalo wallowed in mudholes, on the other side of the palm trees. I liked the usual things - eating roasted coconuts and fried bananas, chasing catfish in the grass in the rain." This world from Min Fong Ho's childhood is the setting for Hush.

Hush! is a lullaby where a mother whispers to the birds in the air, the animals on the ground and the insects on the vegetation to quiet themselves so her baby can go to sleep. In the end, the world is asleep, the mother is asleep, all are asleep,  except the baby who lies smiling in his cot. 

The lovely illustrations of Thai scenes are perfect for the story, but unfortunately not done by a POC.

Hush! makes a great bedtime book and has just enough irony for any exhausted parent.

If this is inappropriate to post, just let me know and I'll remove it (or a mod could delete it); I'm not sure of the protocols for posting lists of books I haven't read.

The World eBook Fair is offering a collection of over 2 million ebooks, mostly in PDF format, until August 4th. (Most, perhaps all, of these are available on their original sites; right now, World eBook Fair is hosting all of these. After Aug 4, they'll be scattered again.)

The following collections include many, sometimes all, authors of color:
( ACIP, BuddhaNet, e-Asia collection, eBooksBrasil, ETANA, Classic Chinese Literature, Himalayan Academy, Islamic collection, Japanese collection, Logos, Project Madura )

26. Faith Adiele, Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

Faith is the daughter of a Swedish mother and a Nigerian father; she grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She is smart, motivated, and involved, and her drive to succeed gets her a scholarship to Harvard, where she is involved in social work in addition to her classes.

And the pressure quickly causes her to fail and drop out.

This book is a memoir, mainly focusing on the time Faith spent in Thailand, where after leaving Harvard she went to work on an Anthropological research project about the status of women, particularly Buddhist nuns. Faith eventually decides to live as a nun herself for a season. The book jumps around in time a great deal, following a chapter about daily life as a nun with one about Faith's childhood, and then with another about prostitutes in Thailand's big cities. This style sometimes made things a little hard to follow, but it also was great for focusing on thematic issues instead of narrative. Another thing I disliked was that the book is published in a style that has quotes from scholars, Buddhist practitioners, and Faith's journal along the edges of the pages, making it look more like a textbook than a memoir.

However, I did like this book a lot. It's written in a style that accommodates both people who know nothing about Thailand or Buddhism with those who have more knowledge. Faith's comparison of the pressure and the succeed/fail mentality of Western culture against the more internal processes of Thai Buddhism are also pretty insightful, although they can be a bit simplistic at times. I really enjoyed her descriptions of meditation and mindfulness. She is a very vivid writer, and very readable. I really enjoyed this book.

Also recommended: If anyone is looking for more recommendations of books by POC, I really liked this podcast/blog post. Three African-American women talk about books they like. Not all the books mentioned have POC authors, but many do. Plus, though I'd never listened to this podcast before I stumbled on it today, these guys are really funny.

13: 20 Fragments from a Ravenous Youth
14: UFO In Her Eyes, both by Xiaolu Guo

20 Fragments is a revised version of Guo's first novel in Chinese, which she wasn't happy to see translated into English as it was. It's an episodic novel about a young woman who leaves a remote rural village to try and make a life for herself in Beijing. She takes many educational courses, does various menial jobs, gets work as a film extra, has relationships with unsatisfactory men, writes a screenplay that nobody is interested in producing. There's not much of a plot -- it is as fragmentary as the title implies -- but the snapshot vision Guo presents of contemporary Beijing in all its ferment is quite compelling.

UFO In Her Eyes has been reviewed as sf in at least one place, which it doesn't really merit; it's essentially a mundane novel about the "progress" currently sweeping China as seen from the perspective of yet another remote rural village (I'm sensing a theme -- probably because Xialou Guo grew up in a remote rural village). The story is told through documents -- interviews conducted and reports written after a UFO sighting draws the government's attention to this village which has been essentially ignored for most of its existence. The "development" that comes in the wake of the sighting is cruel and indiscriminate and takes no notice of the villagers' own desires, resulting in as much destruction as creation.

Neither of these novels were quite as compulsively readable as A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers or as starkly, austerely perfect as Village of Stone; it seems that Guo reinvents herself with every novel, each time trying out new things. Both of them are excellent, and I recommend them.

15: Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo

This has been reviewed a few times here. A very pointed, funny, and often harrowing satire in a vividly virtuosic style. If it was Africans who conquered Europe and enslaved Europeans, what then? This isn't the only possible answer, but it's a well-imagined and compelling one.

14. Out of India: An Anglo-Indian Childhood by Jamila Gavin

Out of India is an autobiographical account of Jamila Gavin's childhood. She's the daughter of an English mother and an Indian father, both teachers and Christian missionaries. She grew up in India, first visiting England at 5, before settling there aged 11, experiencing life in England during and after WW2, and life in India during the struggles for independence and the Partition. However, as this is a book for children, she doesn't go too deeply into any of these events, instead describing day-to-day life for her and her family. And she's good as descriptions: they're beautiful and evocative.

I enjoyed it, and I think it would be a very good read for children in the right age group.

15. Bindi Babes by Narinder Dhami

Bindi Babes is about three sisters, the coolest girls at their school. Everyone loves them, even the teachers, and it's entirely possible that if anything happened to any of them, the world would end. At first, I did wonder if they were the biggest Mary Sues ever, but after reading for a bit I started to think that Dhami was just having fun. All three sisters are very self-absorbed and more than a little conceited, but funny enough to just about get away with it.

The story focuses on what happens when their aunt arrives from India, determined to stop their dad spoiling them (as he has been doing since their mother's death). Meanwhile, at school, an Ofsted inspection is coming up and making the teachers panic. The aunt was the character I liked the most, and I have to admit I loved the scenes where she foiled the girls' plans to get rid of her.

16. Dead Gorgeous by Malorie Blackman

Nova's parents own a hotel, where they live with Nova, her sister Rainbow, and their little brothers. Nova's unhappy with her life, jealous of her older sister, and suffering from bulimia. Then she sees a gorgeous boy in the lobby: Liam. Ten years ago, Liam stormed out of his house after an argument with his dad. Now, he's a ghost, trapped in the hotel.

Dead Gorgeous is sometimes funny and sometimes sad. It's got lots of great (and mysterious!) characters, all with their own problems and issues. I liked that it wasn't a romance, but instead focused on family (Nova and Rainbow, Liam and his brother, all of them and their parents). I like most of Malorie Blackman's books, but I think this is one of my favourites by her.

Hey all,

So we're still working out how to revamp the current tagging system, especially since we've run against the 1000-tag limit twice in about two months.

From comments here, it seems as though most people use the author tags, and a few people would like tags with even more granularity (i.e. tags to find entries by who posted).

However, given LJ's tag limit, it doesn't seem feasible to keep all the tags on LJ, unless we cut down on what we tag. Currently, the author tags comprise of about 500+ tags, with the rest being a mish-mash of genre, race, ethnicity, nationality, and subject.

We've also been thinking of using our Delicious to tag posts on the comm and using a combination of Delicious + LJ. The combination would be something like keeping all the author tags on LJ and then putting tags for other things on Delicious.

A geeky table with benefits and downsides!

	LiveJournal	Delicious + LJ combination
Benefits	All in one place Users can tag their own entries We know how it works	No limit on tags Ability to search on a combination of tags (ex. find all the entries on books set in India posted by sanguinity) Some tags still viewable from LJ
Downsides	Limit to number of tags, meaning we will have to not tag certain things No ability to narrow down searches	Hard to keep coordinated Putting the tags solely on Delicous means fewer people will see them More work for mods

Poll #1429226 Tagging poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I would prefer entries in the community tagged on

25. Amjed Qamar, Beneath My Mother's Feet

A young adult novel about Nazia, a 14-year-old in a working-class family in Karachi, Pakistan. Nazia is smart, doing well in school, and engaged to her cousin. However, when her father is injured and loses his job, things quickly go downhill. Nazia's mother gets a job cleaning houses, and Nazia is forced to drop out of school to help.

This book was seriously brutal in the multitude of bad things which happen to Nazia and her family. It never came off as unbelievable or emotionally manipulative, but it was shocking to see how little a supportive net there was available for this family, and how quickly they lost everything. Overall, this wasn't even a depressing book, mainly because of Nazia, who is a strong and optimistic character. She may have a bit too much faith in people, but she relies on herself, and ends up finding her own solution. Recommended.



Also, wheeeee! Halfway to the goal!

Yoshiko Uchida published A New School for Susan in 1951, and I read it out of historical interest as much as anything else: what were the yay!multiculturalism books of the fifties like?

This one, at least, is a very stereotypically fifties children’s book: happy little boys and girls attending their happy little school, where they draw cheerful little pictures under the watchful eyes of their cheery teacher and jolly principal. It’s just that instead of featuring little blonde girls named Sally and Sandy and Susan, the Susan in this book is Japanese-American.

This book might be the most frictionless thing I’ve ever read. No arguments, no conflicts of any kind, certainly no mention of racism or the Japanese internment camps – which would have been a pretty raw memory in 1951, so I can’t blame Uchida if she didn't want to write about it. But still, not even any arguments?

So I can't recommend the book on its intrinsic merits, but it really was interesting as a historical artifact - especially if you compares it to Uchida's later books, like Journey to Topaz, which is all about the Japanese internment camps.

9. American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang

I devoured this book. And then I read it two more times.

I'm not sure exactly why I feel in love with it like I did - I even found his insertion of Christianity into the story to be a little squicky. (He comments on his decision here. I'm not at all saying he was wrong to insert Christianity - I think my discomfort actually stems from the fact that I would have adapted stories to make them Christian in much the same way when I was a Christian.)

But... I found the use of Chinese characters to illustrate kung fu fight scenes absolutely delightful (especially because I knew most of them). And I loved how he made the three narratives fit together (I didn't see it coming). And I loved all these little things.

And there were some quotes that I thought were lovely and deep, such as "Returning to your true form is not an exercise of kung fu, but a release of it."

And the book really showed in a crystal clear way what it means to fade into whiteness, and what that entails giving up. I think this is what spoke to me most deeply.

Highly recommended.

7. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

What everyone else said. I loved this book. There are lots of people I want to give a copy of it to.

8. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie

I found this harder to read than Absolutely True Diary; the writing style was much more opaque, full of long rambling sentences without a comma to be seen. It's also heavy in magic realism, which tends to make a work hard for me to get into.

Something I found interesting about it was the set of elements found in this book also found in Absolutely True Diary, such as having a character with hydrocephalus (I just read his Wikipedia page, and saw that he apparently based this on himself).

There were a few lines that I found striking and thought-provoking, such as this:

They all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names. That is the problem with Indians these days. They have the same names all their lives. Indians wear their names like a pair of bad shoes.

The Devil's Kiss was previously reviewed on the comm here so I'll just put my personal response here and skip the summary bits.

I read a review The Devil's Kiss today which seemed to put it in with all the vampire novels that are coming out for girls at the moment (and variants such as the werewolves and even zombies – yes, zombies as romantic interests!) It doesn't belong to this particular genre of supernatural book at all. The Devil's Kiss bears more resemblance to things like Anthony Horowitz's Power of Five series – except without failing on the female protagonist – or to Skulduggery Pleasant, where the girl actually does kick ass. It's an action-adventure, with the addition of Judeo-Christio-Islamic mythology (and definitely all three). Which means it's right up my alley.

There is some romance, yes, but not with a jerk. ( Spoilers! ) And while Billi is a sword-fighter, Kay has the female-coded psychic abilities. It's nice to have a story that can give the female character some romance without letting that overwhelm her character.

The prose itself wasn't anything special, and I think I skimmed a lot of the descriptive parts, but I was gripped by the story, engaged by the world and the characters. There's a sequel coming out, which I'm keen for, but it's also a fully self-contained story (another nice change!) Particularly recommended for teenage girls who like action-adventure and are sick of having their gender relegated to secondary roles!