On author of color

This post is taken from the Goodreads List “Best Fiction and Memoirs by Authors of Color."

I have to be honest that my knowledge of authors of color is limited. I have so many books on my to-read list that fall under this category, but I haven’t been as dedicated to tracking them down as I should be. When I was looking through this Goodreads list, I was a little ashamed to realize that I’ve only read 5 of the top 100 books and 3 are on my to-read list. Obviously I have a lot of catching up to do. In looking at this list, I’m realizing that I’ve heard of so many of these books - so how have I never gotten around to reading them? It’s about time I started.

Below is some information about the top book on this list and the books on it that I have read.

TOP BOOK

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.
  
  Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of women of color in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.

FROM MY BOOKSHELF

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (#7)
• 'On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.'
  
  Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.
• I have always loved this book. But I had no idea (until looking at this list and doing a little more research) that Alexandre Dumas is an author of color. In fact, his father was a slave in Haiti and moved to France once he was freed. It’s a fascinating bit of knowledge that makes this book a little more interesting.

• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (#9)
• In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spoke Indian Reservation. These 22 interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of James Many Horses III," even though he actually writes them on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.
• This is a fun book with some really interesting stories. Honestly, I don’t remember many of them anymore, though. I’ve heard that Sherman Alexie has done more fantastic work, so this could be a good opportunity for me to delve deeper.

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (#35)
• The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.
  
  The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea.
• THIS BOOK WAS SO GOOD. This is one of those books that really stays with you and makes its mark. Perhaps I’m due for a reread.

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (#36)
• Amir is the son of a wealthy Kabul merchant, a member of the ruling caste of Pashtuns. Hassan, his servant and constant companion, is a Hazara, a despised and impoverished caste. Their uncommon bond is torn by Amir's choice to abandon his friend amidst the increasing ethnic, religious, and political tensions of the dying years of the Afghan monarchy, wrenching them far apart. But so strong is the bond between the two boys that Amir journeys back to a distant world, to try to right past wrongs against the only true friend he ever had.
  
  The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
  
  A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.
• I was probably too young to read this book when I did. I remember very little about it (except for a rape scene that disturbed me greatly) and didn’t fully understand anything that was going on in this book. Perhaps I would better appreciate it now.

• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (#48)
• In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish-and the tragic way in which it has come true.
  
  The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember…
• This was another book that I may have been a little young to read and understand (I was in middle school). However, I enjoyed immensely what I could understand and this gave me a lot to consider in a very undiverse community and school.

What books have you read from this Goodreads list? What books aren’t on it that you would add? Which books on this Goodreads list seem the most important in your mind? What other Goodreads lists would you be interested in being blogged about?