Posted by Rachel on: 01.23.2007 /
As an avid reader, I was recently prompted by some comments on another blog to make a critical examination of my reading list. The bloggers in that particular discussion were sharing with one another their book recommendations and I noticed that every one of the authors mentioned were Western white males. Since it is a blog that appeals mainly to progressive types, I was surprised and I prepared to post my enlightening observation.
But then it occurred to me that I should probably inventory my own reading material first. So I got up and went around the house and collected the last 26 books I’d purchased and read. And 22 were written by Western white males. Three by women and one (ONE!) by a two/thirds world author. Yikes! Suddenly I didn’t feel so self-righteous.
It was a good wake-up call and I’ve set a goal for myself for 2007: I need to broaden my reading list. I need to hear more diverse voices, more people of color, more women and especially, more non Westerners.
* Can you recommend some books for me that represent more diverse voices and communities?
* What patterns do you notice in your own reading material? What factors determine your literary choices?
Comment by: Helen
1Rachel, thanks - this is a great question.
Interestingly (you probably didn’t see this), Jason Clark recently wrote about how he is intentional about reading voices outside his subculture and asked his blog readers the question “How can we avoid too much self-referencing?” You might like to see what answers people came up with over there.
I can name a couple of specific books which opened my eyes a little. I read White Teeth by Zadie Smith and that helped me understand the Asian culture in London better. I thought it was an extremely well-written novel - it’s long; it takes a while to read. Zadie Smith is female and Asian.
Also, it was reading the novel Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver which opened my eyes to some of the things Native Americans have gone throught. I don’t know what ethnicity she is. She’s an awesome writer, I think.
When I read Cold Mountain it helped me have perspective on my own life - not by comparing with another culture but with the historical reality of Americans having to spend all their time doing things like growing and preparing the food they needed to eat. And I just go to the grocery store (on Sunday morning, sometimes ;-))
Oh, I read some other book that was very well written, but it was a difficult read for me - which leads me into, how do I choose novels? I don’t like them to be too harrowing. That book was beautifully written but about very sad things that happened to a family. If you can handle it it shows the reality of what some people in another culture have been through. Ok, I asked my husband was that book was: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
I do enjoy reading that enlightens me about other cultures. I think one of the problems is - to read about certain cultures you need to find a book by someone who has left that culture and speaks English, or has a translator. Because people who live there don’t have things like computers and publishers - if indeed they have pens and paper. (Sorry, I don’t know - I am pretty ignorant about this stuff)
Comment by: Eliza
2Quick thought, 2 novels:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan, before and after Taliban came to power; then experience as an immigrant to US)
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (tale of intrigue set in ~16th century Turkey)
Comment by: benjamin ady
3I’m kind of thinking this bodes well for my eventual chances of getting published compared to … say… an female of asian descent. Althouh maybe that doesn’t really work. Maybe there are so many white males trying to get published, and so relatively few non white-males trying to get published, that it would actually serve as an advatage if I were…say, a native american. Hmmmm… This reminds me of another bizarre realization I had last year. The probability is relatively large (perhaps even p > .1?) that I have a half asian half sibling out there somewhere. That made me trip out for a while. I’d be driving through the U-district, and see people that looked as if they might be half asian and around my age, and think “my god, that could be my sibling.” Very strange.
I have a srong sensation that the above paragraph(s) might be strongly un-PC. If so, I do hope I haven’t been offensive. ‘Twasn’t my intention to be offensive.
Comment by: Karen
4“Things Fall Apart” - classic story of colonialism by Nigerian Chinua Achebe.
“Reading Lolita in Tehran - by an Iranian woman author Azar Nafisi.
“The Satanic Verses - by Salman Rushdie.
“Guns Germs and Steel” - by white American Jared Diamond but gives fascinating insights into the evolution of cultures from all over the world.
I enjoy everything I’ve read from Chilean author Isabel Allende, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and South African Nadine Gordimer.
Keeping up with my book club sets my reading agenda for the most part, and we intentionally read a lot of international authors. It really does give you a much wider perspective on the world, I think.
Comment by: Rachel
5Thanks for the excellent recommendations, Helen, Eliza & Karen! I will take a list down to my local library.
I haven’t read the book but I did watch the three part series on PBS and I found it very fascinating and enlightening as well.
Comment by: Karen
6Yeah, I saw that also. Wasn’t that great? It’s all about geography, baby! :-)
We’re reading the book in book club - I think it’s on the sked for early 2008 (yes, we plan ahead!) - and I’m interested in some of the background about his research that probably didn’t make it into the series.
Comment by: Eliza
7Sherman Alexie is a Spokane Indian author & poet. My book club read his short story collection Ten Little Indians.
Comment by: ncxian
8I had some trouble posting at this blog yesterday, and by this morning, you all had mostly covered the ones my book club has read! We discovered early on in our existence that white guys were the majority of what we were reading so we’ve tried to pay attention. The only two I would recommend that haven’t already been listed at this point are The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai and The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Neither of those was unanimously liked by our group, but both got generally good reviews. The Kite Runner that Eliza recommended was enjoyed by all.
Karen, can you tell me what is the best of the Nadine Gordimer books? My husband and I are the book choosers for the next meeting, plus there are copies of a lot of her books in our library for me to preview.
Comment by: Helen
9My husband loves Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. (In case this makes a difference, it’s a collection of short stories rather than one novel).
Comment by: Karen
10Interpreter of Maladies is on our club’s reading list this year. I’m glad to hear your husband liked it, Helen. I hadn’t heard anything about it.
NC, I really liked The Conservationist (which won the Booker Prize in 1974) and a more recent one of hers, The Pickup. That one is less about apartheid and more about sensibilities of people living in lesser developed countries, told through a romance. Her writing is just beautiful, though, so I think anything she does it great.
Comment by: David H
11I know the following two are WWM (white, western males) but figured I would toss them out because of some general insights they gave into non-traditional western cultures. Both are relatively light reading: Tony Hillerman and Graham Greene.
Hillerman is ostensibly a pulp mystery writer. However, his immersion in the culture and geography of Native Americans (particularly Navajo and Hopi) have enabled him to introduce a diverse audience to those people. I found particularly enlightening the book “Sacred Clowns,” which deals eloquently with how the western legal system (with its distant links to Judeo/Christian standards) jibes and differs with the Navajo sense of harmony. In the following passage Police Officer Jim Chee tries to explain the variance to his girlfriend:
Graham Greene is ostensibly an Englishman writing about the world. However, through his travels he gained enough knowledge about cultural and geography (most especially how those played a role in forming variations of Catholic religion). Having been to Central America I found “The Power and the Glory” amazingly eye-opening in terms of culture and faith. The priest who is the central character of that story taught me more about faith than most of the pastors who have graced me with their sermons.
Both writers may also provide an entree to the cultures they write about that may be more difficult to achieve through authors directly from those settings. Marquez is an amazing writer, but his books are fairly dense and few Native American authors can reach Hillerman’s audience despite their talent or insight. Both Hillerman and Greene have provided an easy jumping off place for me to begin casual discussions with people about how divergent other cultures and views may be from the common American perspective. For that I will forgive them their WWM-ness.
Comment by: Helen
12David - I do think there’s value in reading WWMs who have taken time to learn about other cultures and write informatively and accurately about them.
The main problem with this is the many books by WWM (or, substitute ‘person in my subculture’) who have not taken time to write what is informative and accurate and yet they write anyway and promote their book as THE book on that topic.
The conservative Christian world in particular (or maybe it’s just that that’s the only world I know well enough to know this) is way too content to read books by self-professed experts who really are not experts at all, that promote inaccurate derogatory stereotypes rather than disseminating accurate information.
The problem with these non-experts, imo, is - they never listened to those who really are experts, who could inform them how wrong they are. The non-experts just went out for a short while with their stereotype, held it up, decided yes it’s true and then wrote it down, had it published and are now selling their book about it.
Comment by: HereandNow
13Jim Harrison has written many great novels, but I recommend Dalva, The Road Home (sequal/prequal to Dalva) and True North. He writes beautifully about frail humans. Throughout his work is a voice of a white man who understands how unjust white men have been to Native Americans and to the natural world.
Loise Erdrich is a Native American woman who writes beautifully.
Soul Mountain by Goa Xingjian is a great but somewhat weighty book about a chinese person living as an individual during a time when the individual was an enemy to the state. The result is often intense isolation, but it is an overwhelmingly beautiful novel/memoir.
Comment by: Pam Hogeweide
14great post and point, rachel, on the fact that our bookstores are dominated by one demographic. i find the writing world so elitist.
i’d love to have a more diverse reading list, and also of people who are don’t have a bunch of credentials and letters after their name. uneducated people can write and have something to say, too.
which is why i give my support and time to a wonderful local non-profit called Write Around Porltand. They offer free writing workshops for people living in the margins of society, like low-income residents, prisoners, war vets, homeless youth, and others. I think there is a link at Write Around to purchase the anthology of writing collected from workshop participants. Good stuff.
Comment by: Doreen
15What a great topic. Here are some books I’ve read recently that were not written by Western white men (or at least not by middle aged ones, lol).
Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930 by Cynthia Grant Tucker. Fascinating picture of how women ministered during that period.
Son of a Preacher Man by Jay Bakker (yes, Jim & Tammy Faye’s son). I also watch his TV show, One Punk Under God.
Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement by Lauren Sandler
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
I’m about a third of the way through Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and about half way through Ann Rice’s Christ the Lord.
As you can see, I don’t read much fiction. When I do, I stick to favorites such as Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, and Chris Bohjalian. It has never bothered me that they are all white Western men.
poetcomic.blogspot.com
Comment by: Eliza
16Here are a few nonfiction books. These are all by western white folks, but each writes from extended experience or contact with a different culture (or, in Paul Farmer’s case, with impoverished and ill people in several different cultures).
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Fabulous book, about the culture clash between Hmong immigrants & the Northern California community they were living in, centered around the markedly different cultural approaches taken by the family & the Western medical establishment toward a Hmong child with severe epilepsy.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission To Promote Peace…One School At A Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. This was just recommended to me today; the reviews look great & it was a NYTimes bestseller, won awards, etc. It’s by/about a US climber cared for by a Pakistani village after a climbing incident, who vowed to return & build the village a school. He ended up selling everything he owned in the quest to do that, having to contend with the Taliban & other threats, & now 14 yrs later he has built 58 schools, including for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village by Sarah Erdman. About her 2 yrs as a Peace Corps health care volunteer in a small town in Africa, learning what mattered to people & how to present health care & health education by following those cues. (She now works for the Peace Corps in Washington DC.)
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer. The first chapter, and an interview with Farmer, are available at that link. From a review on that page:
Anyone have any suggestions for “don’t miss” books by the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu?
Comment by: Rachel
17Several months ago I read a wonderful book by Desmond Tutu called “God Has A Dream” (that one didn’t get counted in my inventory because I checked it out from the library). It was beautiful and inspiring and I would definitely recommend it.
Comment by: ncxian
18I just finished reading a book called The Translator, by Leila Aoulela. The book jacket says this:
Aboulela is Sudanese and muslim. This book would be great for a women’s book club (a little bit girly for my mixed book club–but maybe not). I found it interesting given a lot of the conversations here about faith. This book offers a glimpse of the perspective of a devout person of faith, and in particular a muslim voice.
Plus there are several cool seemingly throw-away comments about Islam and how it impacts society. The professor is apparently teaching “the difference between Western liberalism and Islam is that the center of one was freedom and the other was justice”. I can’t find the quote for the other thought that stuck in my head, but it was something about that capitalism couldn’t take hold in Islamic countries because the religion required the fracturing (redistributing?)of wealth. I would love to have a live person to discuss that with–what about the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and other places?
Comment by: Rachel
19Thanks for the book recommendation, ncxian!
Perhaps they aren’t doing a very good job of actually living out the teachings of their faith on poverty and wealth. We could certainly say the same about our “Christian” society, which seems to totally disregard the teachings of Christ and of the early church on economics.