As I mentioned, I've been reading a lot about race, racism, and anti-racism, and one of the communities I came across was
50books_PoC. Reading some books by people of color seems like a good idea, but 50 in a year seems like setting myself up to fail. To get a good sense of what would be a reasonable challenge, I decided to look at both the books I own and
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Some lists of fic with POC characters I've found helpful:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pRyxp56fZaFExx5LJ6BO1DA [This one is not all POC--it's POC and/or female protagonists]
http://theyayayas.wordpress.com/booklists/asian-american-protagonists-in-ya-fiction/
http://carmarthen.livejournal.com/309864.html and http://oyceter.livejournal.com/750324.html
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Not a PoC author, but Shannon Hale's Book of a Thousand Days is set in a kind of Mongolia.
checking the web for information on Shaun Tan to see if his last name indicates Asian heritage ... oh, good, he qualifies! He wrote The Arrival (well, drew - it has no words), and his Tales from Outer Suburbia just came out - again, really, really awesome. Also, points for the websiteWow, I can think of a lot of graphic novels - there's also Skim by Mariko Tamaki, which I don't think I liked so much, but tastes differ. The female protagonist has a relationship with a female teacher ( ... )
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I've read Book of a Thousand Days.
I haven't read anything by Laurence Yep. I know he's well-known, so maybe I'll try him.
I just did a quick count of the YA I read last year, and it seems to be pretty evenly split between sci fi/fantasy and not, so other things are totally okay!
The Alexie book is totally on my to-read list! I just read someone's rec for it, and it sounded interesting.
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Melissa de la Cruz, author of the Blue Bloods series. Maybe a couple of people on the YALSA listserv have said those were a cut above Twilight in terms of vampire books, or maybe not.
Hmm. Kalpa imperial by Angelica Gorodischer - I have never heard of that book, but it looks interesting. Translated by Ursula Le Guin. Does Argentinian count as PoC? I don't know if the author considers her ethnicity to be Hispanic or non-Hispanic.
...I am totally going to scroll through this whole giant list, and then maybe look up Russian authors to see if there's anyone interesting I don't know about. Thank you for asking things that inspire me to practice using NoveList! (Your public library may subscribe to it, too - worth checking.)
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My public library does subscribe to NoveList. Maybe I'll have to do some investigating.
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Hispanic and Latin@ are both language/cultural identities; neither one identifies race. So it's possible to be white and Hispanic, or black and Hispanic, or indigenous and Hispanic, or mestizo and Hispanic... Same with Latin@.
And then there's the thing where people who are perceived to be white in their home country aren't necessarily perceived to be white in another -- that can confuse matters quite a bit.
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Angelica Gorodischer is white, but I'm quite willing to be corrected on that.
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Women healers
Women warriors
Heroes and heroines
Good and evil
Quests
Men/women relations
Visions
Mind control
Magic
Warlocks
Fantasy fiction, Canadian
Canadian fiction
Fantasy romances
So that's just an example of how, if you want to search NoveList, you can look for something REALLY specific. "Do you have any books by Canadians that are about mind control and have romance in them?" :)
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The only thing I can possibly recommend is the Tales of Earthsea series, which is by a woman with an interesting name (that I've forgotten) and is apparently all about brown people. But I can't tell you if it's any good or not--most fantasy is not my thing.
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I just checked out the first Earthsea book (Ursula K. Le Guin is the author) from the library this week! I've always been resistant to reading them because my rebellious streak is not into classics of any sort, but I figured it would be worth a try.
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(LeGuin herself isn't a POC, though, I don't think. And those lists I gave you above, I just noticed, are mostly lists of novels with POC main characters, not necessarily by POC authors).
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(Yeah, I think she's white.)
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