Reading Diversely 2015 Summary

My last few posts before my inadvertent blog hiatus were about K.T. Bradford’s article on xojane I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year. My version was to be more aware of what I was reading and to consciously chose to read more writers of color.

I did … not do great in 2015. It would be really easy to kind of slink my way out of saying so and just drop the topic (as with so many intentions when it comes to blogging that kind of disappear). But, I think it’s important to not do that. I consider myself one of those thoughtful, anti-racist white people, and I’m still not doing so great. It takes effort for me to not read just white women with a smattering of white men. I’m not saying it’s hard. This is not rocket science. But it does take change. It does take listening to voices I didn’t realize I wasn’t listening to, just to find the kinds of books that I want to read written by people of color. And sometimes it means reading books that I’m not sure I want to read but trying anyway.

And while I didn’t do great numbers-wise, I noticed that by the end of the year my tastes had changed (not all because of this challenge, but it was one strand in it.) A lot of books felt too much the same to others or too flat. And too improbably white. I also read a lot of fantastic books, the most I’ve ever posted on my my About me page, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many were authors of color.

To the numbers:

According to Goodreads, I read 117 books in 2015.

73 were by white women, and an additional 3 DNF

9 were by white men

25 were by women of color, and an additional 1 DNF

5 were by men of color, and an additional 1 DNF

That’s 85 books by white people or 73%

And 32 books by people of color or 27%

 

Reading Diversely–Update

I thought I was doing well. It’s shocking how not well I’m doing at being thoughtful in my reading choices. It’s been a month and a half, more or less, since my last post. Here are my numbers:

48 books read (I’m on drugs after minor surgery. I’m aware my numbers don’t add up, but I can’t make them and I give up)

32 by white authors

14 by authors of color (that’s less than half! better than 20% in Februrary, but I still have a lot of catching up to do)

42 by women

5 by men

If you count the books I have started but not finished but mean to go back to, it’s even worse: 10 books (really?? Who is the midst of 10 books? 3 are poetry collections, if that helps)

All of them are by women.

One will probably be DNF.

4 are by women of color.

6 are by white women.

This is me trying and still reading mostly white women. This is my library not having any poetry collections (on the shelves in front of me the day I went) by any of the black women I looked for (Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Nelson or Maya Angelou). This is all of our book club books this year have been by white people. This is also me deciding to try to read all of Margo Lanagan’s books.

Amazing books by authors of color I’ve read so: Under the Painted Sky by Stacey Lee, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brisset, Fire in the Streets by Kekla Magoon, and Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (which is going on my best reads of 2015 list)

Reading Challenge–Reading Diversely

I tried not to look at the other results when I was searching for K.T. Bradford’s article on xojane I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year, but unsurprisingly, it looks pretty bad. Mostly I wanted to do this for my own information, but now I don’t mind adding my noise against the ignorant, the racists and the sexists.

Last year, I recorded reading 76 books. I know I read more like 120 books, but I get lazy and I read fast and I forget what I read. Which is why I want to write down what I’ve been reading in the first place. Anyway. Since high school or college I’ve consistently read many more women than men, so that’s a given.

2014

Women authors (presumed to be white): 63 out of 76

Women authors of color: 5 out of 76 (yeesh)

Men authors of color: 6 (ditto)

Men (presumed to be white): 7

Look at that. Even given my bias against men, I still managed to read more white men than either women or men of color. That’s bad.

As for content:

6 books had a character with some kind of disability or disability was important to the narrative (the wording here because of a memoir)

22 books had characters of color

4 books had a LGBTQ character

66 books had a woman main character or focused on women

Those numbers are a little soft since I read a number of books about writing (by women) and a bunch of SFF that had non-humans as the main characters.

I was already doing better in 2015 before the challenge:

31 books read

7 written by people of color (6 women, 1 man)

28 written by women

That’s still 24 books by white women.

What I’m Reading

I just got back from a two-week vacation.

While I was away I read (or re-read:
the YA classic, The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. Classic for a reason

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach. Revolting as you might guess, intriguing and snort out loud funny in parts. The first half was better than the second. I left it in Nairobi for my brother-in-law’s perplexed and intrigued Kenyan girlfriend

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, by John Allen Paulos. I might finally be able to resolve the argument my sister and I have about coin tosses and if each is independent do the odds of each flip change in a series of flips. (Yes, I’m pretty sure now it does).

I tried to read Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and failed. Yes I know it’s won awards, but it was too bloated to read on a plane. I don’t know if I’ll go back and try again. I have to like or at least relate to the characters in order to read a book and I didn’t care about any of them on first reading.

Currently Reading:
(Re-reading) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. Because the first time I read it for pleasure and now I’m reading it for craft and to see if all the questions raised by the narrative are actually answered by the ending. And also to see how I feel about the ending the second time. I find it hard to keep up my suspension of disbelief for really grandiose (2nd definition in the Merriam Webster, not the first) endings. (For example, I needed two readings of The Gate of the Gods by Martha Wells for me to like the ending of the trilogy). Besides she lives in Brooklyn, like me! And she’s an author of color who speaks on race and seems all around awesome. I even bought her book, which I don’t do often (thank you public libraries).

TBR:
Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh because it keeps getting mentioned on blogs I’m reading and I still love her Morgaine novels (apparently these are out of print and I can’t link to them. Atrocious! If you can find them: Gate of Ivrel, Well of Shiuan, Fires of Azeroth and Exile’s Gate). I loved the Faded Sun series as a teenager, but haven’t been able to re-read them as an adult because of all the pain in them. And while I haven’t kept up with Foreigner, the early books are excellent.

Bloodshot by Cherie Priest. I hate vampires, but I loved Boneshaker and it was the only other book by her in my library. (Good lord, am I going to have to buy a kindle to read Clementine? Hard copies start at $65 on Amazon). Ohh she has a new book coming out in September!

Inda by Sherwood Smith. Re-read so I can finish the series. This keeps getting pushed back because it gets into my head and I can’t write with it in my head. That’s a good thing for the story, not as good for my writing.

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

A lot of people ask this question. I want to know the answer from my favorite authors, so I can look forward to their next book. Writers ask it because we’re always wondering how others work and if they have a better system that we can borrow parts of. The general non-writing public asks it because they’re fascinated by the creative process and how writers make so much out of so little. At least that’s my guess.

So how long does it take me? I really have to think about that and the answer is, it depends.

My first, still unfinished (as in not polished, although I have a full story arc) book, has been in process for…at least eight years. I still hope to go back to it, and I might even have enough life experience now to understand that one character’s motivation. He was sabotaging the whole story because I couldn’t figure him out.

I finished what I thought was a close to final draft of my second book, working title The Desert Wall, in the first six months of 2008. It was 45,000 words and I was worried it was too short. I gave it to a fantastic reader and based on her initial comments, I revised it for a year. So I finished it, more or less, in June 2009. I had added 50,000 words (yikes!) and many, but not all, parts were unrecognizable from the first draft. I started sending it out to agents in August, although I admit I didn’t get going until about January 2010.

Meanwhile, I had started my third book in the hiatus between giving TDW to my reader and getting comments back. So that was about May 2008. Then I took a long break to finish TDW. A really long break. I didn’t start working on The Red Fortress until August 2009. I was worried it was broken, that I had left it too long, but the magic was still there. (Which I found after a lot of hard work.) I finished a rough draft in November. So again about six months. And now I’m in the structural morass of taking my first extensive outline/sketchy draft and making it into a story.