Diversity in reading

After a couple of months, I’ve decided to pick up the challenge of my American cyber buddy Dana Huff, an English teacher, who blogged about a meme called “Diversity in reading” – see her posting here.
So to answer the questions about my recent reading:
1. Name the last book by a female author that you’ve read.
“The Believers” by Zoe Heller [my review here]
2. Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you’ve read.
“Dreams From My Father” [my review here] and “The Audacity Of Hope” [my review here] by Barack Obama
3. Name one from a Latino/a author.
“My Life” by Fidel Castro [my review here] and “Life Of Pi” by Yann Martel [my review here]
4. How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?
“The Kite Runner” [my review here] and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” [my review here] by Khaled Hosseini
5. What about a GLBT writer?
Sorry – nothing here
6. Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you’re feeling lucky?
“The Almond” [my review here] by Nedjma (Moroccan) and ”A Woman In Jerusalem” [my review here] by A.B. Yehoshua (Israeli)
7. Any other “marginalized” authors you’ve read lately?
“The Reader” [my review here] by Bernhard Schlink (German), “Sophie’s World” [my review here] by Jostein Gaarder (Norwegian), “One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” [my review here] by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russian), “Life & Times Of Michael K” [my review here] by J.M. Coetzee (South African), “Slumdog Millionaire” [my review here] by Vikas Swarup (Indian), “The Sorrow Of War” [my review here] by Bao Ninh (Vietnamese)
So how about you? How diverse is your reading?


2 Comments

  • Philip

    1. Team of Rivals by Doris something Kearns.
    2. I don’t know. Unless by some quirk of fate I know some background about the author, I simply don’t know.
    3. Not Love in the time of Cholera (which was great) but Gabriel Garcia Marquez book about drugs in Columbia.
    4. Define Asia. I can go for White Tiger or Q&A from the Indian sub-continent (don’t like Salmon Rushdie stuff – too magical). Or Haruki Murakami’s What I talk about when I talk about running.
    5. I don’t know. See 2. I’m not sure it would benefit me to know either. A potential variation of judging a book by its cover. I read Oscar Wilde 20 odd years ago, but I can’t claim to remember the books I’ve read since then or the sexuality of the authors. Homer (no pun intended)? Who knows?
    6. Orhan Pamuk’s book My Name is Red. s’alright.
    7. ‘Marginalized’ authors? I have no idea what this means. Saint Simon? Adolf Hitler? To me, Dan Brown is a marginalized author as I simply cannot read him. He writes like Snoopy ‘It was a dark a stormy night. A shot rang out. The maid screamed.’ Anyone who isn’t translated into English is marginalized for me.
    I would argue that the famous book in the box (The Unfortunates by BS Johnson) is marginalized because its experimental structure isn’t great for printing costs. But a truly excellent read.

  • Dana Huff

    I got one of the strangest, most negative comments in response to that blog post. I would have thought posting about reading to be fairly innocuous!

 




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