Tag: diversity

#Readaroundtheworld: March update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

You want me to nerd out about my little reading project, right? Sure you do. We’re roughly 1/4 of the way through 2021 already somehow, and I’ve read books from 15 US states and 17 countries so far, putting me on track to successfully read books from all 50 states and 68 different countries over the course of the year. Now, realistically, this first three months has been pursuing low-hanging fruit, and I’ve already read multiple books from several different states as well as the UK, and I have at least one other book by a Nigerian on my shelf waiting for me, so as the year goes on it’s going to get more and more difficult to find books that “count” for the series. I’m sure I’ll be able to get the US done one way or another, but the fact is books from Canada and Russia and Australia and the UK weren’t exactly hard to find, and I’m at the point already where I’m picking a country and Googling “Authors from XXX” to find books. There’s several easy ones left (and I have several books on my unread shelf that will fill in some spaces) but these first few months were definitely going to be the fastest ones.

I have been keeping track of the square mileage this has covered, because of course I am, and thus far, excluding the water, 21,418,356 square miles are filled in, which is 37.24% of the world’s surface. This will also be increasing much more slowly, as I’ve got Australia, Canada, Brazil and Russia done already. I’ll be filling in Antarctica and China next month, which are the biggest two chunks left, and after that it’s all smaller countries. Russia was 11.5% of the world’s surface all by itself, so I’m not going to be getting any more big jumps like that.

(How do I plan to fill in Antarctica’s 5.483 million square miles when no one lives there? I’ve decided Ernest Shackleton counts. My game, my rules.)

This has been a fun project so far, although for the most part my international “discovery” authors haven’t really set my world on fire yet, and a lot of the books I’ve really enjoyed this year from authors outside the US have been people I’m already familiar with. There’s also been a touch of strategic rereading going on; I filled in Italy by picking up The Name of the Rose for the first time in forever, and I’ll probably reread A Confederacy of Dunces at some point this year to take care of Louisiana. I might go back to Dumas to get France filled in. But for the most part it’s going to be authors I’m not familiar with, since that’s sort of the point of the entire exercise.

Remember, if you look at the top of the sidebar on the right there, you can follow along with me as I’m doing this if you’re so inclined. I should be done with Requiem Moon in a couple of days, and my next book after that will be another Rachel Caine, so I figured this was a good time to do an update.

#52booksbywomenofcolor, October update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

Technically, this could be my final update if I wanted to– my goal for the year was to read 52 books by women of color, and while I’m not finished with A Song Below Water, it’s been chosen as the 52nd book and it won’t take to the end of the month to finish it. But there’s still two months in 2020 (God help us all), and five authors– S.L. Huang, N.K. Jemisin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Rin Chupeco– were represented twice. There’s also a new book by S.L. Huang on my unread shelf right now. So I figure the new goal is 57 books by 52 women. And after that I might go ahead and get started on 2021’s goal of reading books from as many different countries as I can.

I reviewed a bunch of these, but if there’s anything you’re curious about, feel free to ask. Also, here’s the rest of the list:

On reading projects

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

I got curious the other day about how much geographical diversity my “52 books by women of color” project was representing. If I play a little fast and loose with immigrants (I have arbitrarily decided second-generation American immigrants count, especially if the author’s books reflect the culture of her home country*) the countries represented by authors I’ve either already read or have ordered books from are represented above. I was a little surprised to discover I hit four countries in Africa before Australia joined the list, and the lack of representation in Europe outside of the UK is at least a little surprising, but there it is. Since it’s still September and I’ll finish book 45 on the list today or tomorrow, I’m probably going to expand it to 52 different authors rather than 52 books, and I’m going to see how many different countries I can hit with the rest of those authors.

Next year’s project, I think, is going to see how many books I can read from authors from different countries– no target number, necessarily, but trying to fill in that map as much as I can. It’ll be interesting to see how much I can fill the map in.

That said, if anybody wants to call out some authors who I might be interested in to round out this current project, please feel free– in particular, female-identifying authors of color from mainland Europe, China, Brazil, Afghanistan or the Middle East would be great.

(*) This sort of boiled down to how they chose to identify themselves in biographies, and I’m not digging very hard. Nghi Vo, for example, was born in Peoria and doesn’t say anything about her family or ancestry in any of her bios that I looked at, so she’s American, despite her books having a very strong Southeast Asian flavor to them. If her bio had referred to her as, say, “Chinese-American” (and I have no idea where her people are from, to be clear) I’d have counted her for China. Or, for another example, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia, so that counts even though she lives in America now.

#52booksbywomenofcolor, August update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading6 Comments

I’m 3/4 of the way to my goal with only 2/3 of the year gone, so it’s possible I may be able to convert this from 52 books to 52 authors by the end; school starting and eye surgery have slowed me down a bit, but that should still be doable. At any rate, here’s the most recent batch, some of which I reviewed and some I didn’t; feel free to ask questions if you have them.

#52booksbywomenofcolor: June update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

I’ve officially started my 26th book, which is the halfway point, still with three weeks left in June, so I’m a bit ahead of schedule. I’m continuing to post these to Instagram as I read them (follow me!) but I figure quarterly updates on the blog are OK too. Let me know if there’s anything that I didn’t officially review that you want to know more about.

5:00 PM, Wednesday June 10: 1,994,834 confirmed cases, so we may still hit 2 million today, and 112,647 Americans dead.

#52booksbywomenofcolor: March update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading7 Comments

You may recall that I’m doing this little project where I want to read 52 books by women of color this year. I’m on track right now, as this is the last week of March and I’m just over 1/4 of the way to that magic number– technically, The Book of M is book 14 and I’m reading book 15 right now. That said, I haven’t mentioned all of these books on the site, so I thought I’d do a quick cover gallery for the first quarter of the year.

So. So far, 1/4 of the way through #52booksbywomenofcolor, I’ve read the following:

I’ve done official reviews of a few of them, but not all; let me know if there’s anything any of y’all are curious about.

On Reading: 2019-2020

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It does sort of fascinate me how since I haven’t had the mental energy to write fiction and don’t have the intestinal fortitude to write about politics this blog has spent 2019 morphing into a book review site. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s interesting to see how the site changes as my priorities change.

You should friend or follow me on Goodreads, if you haven’t yet.

At any rate, pictures first! Here are the books I read this year:

Some statistics that I realize only matter to me (but it’s my blog, and if y’all haven’t realized I’m a numbers nerd by now…)

  • According to Goodreads, that’s 135 books for a total of 49,866 pages. This does have full page-count for some books I DNFed but does not count any of the comic books I read this year, which Goodreads would have allowed me to add had I liked. I probably bought at least a few hundred comics this year. Let’s say around 50K pages and leave it at that.
  • 56 of those books were by authors I hadn’t read anything by before this year.
  • Diversity check: I deliberately didn’t keep track of author stats this year because I wanted to see how I read if I didn’t pay attention to who I was reading all that much. About 61 books were by women– nearly half, which isn’t too bad– and at least 41 were by people of color. I feel like that could have been higher.
  • Why “about” and “at least”? Because for some of them it isn’t quite immediately clear how they identify and for a couple at least I may just be wrong. I remember spending some time thinking Hannu Rajaniemi was Indian; he is Finnish, which makes him literally as white as it is possible to be. 🙂
  • Interestingly, despite those numbers, 12 of the 15 slots in my Best Books list this year went to women or people of color. I did not set that up on purpose.
  • One major failure this year was that I wanted to do a lot more rereading, and … just didn’t. If I remember right, I wanted to reread at least 30 books this year and only made it to fifteen. I have to do better on this score next year; eventually my bookshelves are going to literally collapse on me if I don’t do something.

135 books is quite a lot, even by my standards, and I probably won’t make it to that number again next year. Two goals: nebulously, I want to reread more of my books (again!) and I am going to focus on reading books by women of color this year. I want to have read 52 of them by the end of the year– one for each week in the year, although I don’t promise to literally read one of them each week. I’m thinking about making a point to review each of them as I go along, too, or at least a reviewlet; we’ll see what I do about that. Also, this is 52 books, not 52 authors, so if I end up reading three N.K. Jemisin books all three of them count. Just FYI. Trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis; I’m probably going to count anyone who doesn’t explicitly identify as male, but I’m going to continue to call the list “women of color” because “people who do not identify as male of color” seems a trifle too wordy.

First, though, I gotta finish this big-ass book about cancer I just picked up, because obviously we gotta end 2019 and begin 2020 on a positive note, right?

Call for author recommendations

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading7 Comments

8:45 on Christmas Eve is totally the best time to do this, right? I’m sure I’ll get tons of responses.

One of my focuses for my reading next year is going to be on books by women of color. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to set it up; a percentage of my overall books is a possibility, as is simply setting a raw number of books that I want to read– I’m tempted to say 52, a book a week, but that’s going to mean a pretty good number of new authors.

Anyway, I need y’all to give me some names of authors to read. My rather considerable booklist on Goodreads is here, and I’m not exactly coming at this from a place of complete ignorance (you can leave out Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, to start) but there have got to be lots of women of color out there that I don’t know about and I want to know about them. I generally prefer speculative fiction, as you probably already know, but any genre, fiction or nonfiction, is just fine. Recommend some books!

(Also: if you know of authors of color who identify as nonbinary, or genderfluid, or basically anything other than male, go ahead and toss their names in here. So JY Yang, who was AFAB but currently identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, counts, but Yoon Ha Lee, a trans man, does not. If you’re not sure if someone counts go ahead and tell me about them and I’ll sort it out myself later.)