Gene Luen Yang - American Born Chinese

[roadrunnertwice]

(Yup, first post to the community. Not doing the one year challenge, because my to-read shelf is ridiculous, but keeping track seems like a really good idea.)

I read the first half or so of ABC when it was being serialized on Modern Tales and had been meaning to get back to it. And it's a book now, so here we are!

I've got something of a humiliation squick, and this is largely a story about shame and humiliation. It's also a story about the internalized effects of systemic racism, and though it ends on a moderately joyful note, much of it made me sorrowful and sick at heart. So, tough read. Worthy one, though. Yang's cartooning technique is blindingly great, and the... central plot twist? central structural twist? ...is a masterful trick of storytelling. I didn't see it coming, at least.

On Jesus: Yang is devoutly Catholic. I am not. I've read two other comics of his, and there always seems to be some point where Christianity jumps up out of the bushes and says "OH HAY HAI THERE," which discomfits me every time. I'm completely accustomed to reading explicitly Christian themes in mimetic fiction, but for some reason, bringing them into fantasy worlds, even urban fantasy, weirds me out big time. (Note that I said Christian themes; for some reason, I'm totally okay with bringing Christian mythology into worlds that don't universally abide by a Christian morality. I cannot explain this to you.)

That's obviously a personal thing of mine rather than something wrong with the book, but it's important enough to me that I can't properly review the book without mentioning it. Anyway, what threw me here was a reworking of the Journey to the West in which the Monkey King et al are apparently bringing gifts for the infant Christ instead of retrieving a Buddhist sutra. It's weird, and it chucked me out of the story for a while, and then there's fallout from that later on that continued to be weird for me.

(Also, since I have cultural appropriation on the mind lately, that part is a good example of how cultural authority and authenticity matter: as a Chinese-American Catholic, Yang's using and remixing elements of his own identity here, but if a white author had repurposed the Journey to the West like that, it may have ended up sketchy as hell.)

Recs for Indigenous/Anti-Colonialist AUs, Indigenous History, POC SFF Traditions, and More!

[sanguinity]

It's time for our monthly recs post! Usually I make this a space for members to ask for recs that interest them, but this time oyceter and I want to do something different.

Dunno how many of you have been following the dustup over a certain pair of white SFF authors? (Briefest of summaries: one author wrote a "shiny" alternate-universe U.S. "frontier" story in which Indians never existed and the U.S. never had slavery; she also characterized that as a history that wouldn't be "wildly divergent". Another author made statements that, among other things, imply that POC are new to SFF.) Notice, please, that this isn't a post about the two authors: we don't write posts about white authors on this comm.

Given that we don't write posts about white authors, here's the reason I'm even bringing up that hot mess: while browsing nahrat's link round-ups, I've been noticing that now and again someone asks for recs of books that give the lie to the assumptions those two authors made. Unfortunately, the rec-making has been a bit thin, and sometimes is pretty heavily tilted toward white authors.

Happily, reccing POC authors is something this comm does really well. Let's make some recs! I'd like to see recs for the following:

• Alternate histories or universes that are indigenous-centric and/or anti-colonialist. There is no need for the AH/AU to focus on the Americas, and I'd love to see recs that don't.
  
• Books that oppose the notion of an Empty Continent -- again, books can focus on either of the Americas, Australia, Africa, or anywhere else that has had to deal with that lie.
  
• Books about how indigenous peoples have been an integral part of shaping the history of the world, and aren't just optional background scenery.
  
• Books which document and/or demonstrate that POC have a long history with SFF, or a history that's independent of the Verne/Heinlein/Asimov/Campbell anglophone tradition.

If you have other themes that seem appropriate to the discussion, do feel free to start a comment-thread for them.

Additionally, here are two existing POC-author rec-making posts in the discussion:

• ithiliana: Some of my favorite American Indian authors
  "Feel free to suggest other writers! Please!"
  
  
• Bangla at deadbrowalking
  "So several of the Desi folks commenting on the Global Represent thread have mentioned reading genre fiction in Bengali. Who are the authors you recommend? What's been translated to English or other languages?"

Remember, please: this is not a post for discussing white authors; this is a post for reccing POC authors. Let's make some recs!

ETA: I set up some category-specific comment threads below, but if you've got something that needs to be rec'd and the categories seem to be too constraining, DO feel free to ignore the categories. The recs are the important thing here, not the categories.

50 Books POC Fifteen Most Popular Authors

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

In a fit of procrastination last night, I looked up which authors had been most frequently reviewed here. All the authors I've read are great, so if you haven't yet jumped on the bandwagon and checked them out, click on the tags.

1. Way ahead of every other author, the late great sf writer Octavia Butler has 31 reviews! If you've never read her, I would start with Wild Seed, an intense sf novel set in Africa, or Bloodchild, her collection of short stories.

2. Next is literary novelist Toni Morrison, with 18 reviews. I've only ever read Beloved, which I adored but which did give me the impression that Morrison requires a long weekend devoted only to her, with time to decompress afterward.

3. Majorie Liu is next, with 14 reviews. She writes the delightfully insane, "X-Men as genre romance" Dirk & Steele series, in which psychic agents have adventures and romances and run away to the circus and meet the Faery Queen and mermen. As one does.

4. Next comes sf writer Nalo Hopkinson and Sherman Alexie, with 13 reviews each. I haven't yet read Hopkinson, but Alexie is great and I plan to read everything he's ever written.

5. Versatile African-American writer Walter Dean Myers is next, with 12 reviews. He writes YA novels, he writes for adults, he writes gritty realism, he writes gentle comedy, he writes mythic fantasy - and everything I've read of his was at worst enjoyable, and at best brilliant.

6. Graphic novelist Shaun Tan and sf writer Tobias Buckell are next, with 11 reviews each. I haven't read either writer yet, but I mean to. Tan's wordless book The Arrival sounds amazing.

7. The extremely famous and multitalented Samuel Delany is next, with 10 reviews. I have an autobiographical graphic novel by him that he autographed at a con! Also with 10, Mildred Taylor, author of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

8. African-American writers Angela Johnson and Walter Mosley are next, with 9 reviews each. Johnson's The First Part Last is one of my very favorite books I read for this challenge: it packs in a disproportionate amount of beauty and feeling for its short length. I just started reading Mosley's Easy Rawlins noir series, and it's excellent.

9. Finally (I arbitrarily made a cut-off of 8 reviews), Alice Walker and President Barack Obama each have 8 reviews. Didn't she read a poem at his inauguration, or something like that? ETA: Apologies for my brain-freeze. I apparently hallucinated that her Open Letter to Barack Obama was read at the inauguration. Er, and was in verse. Also with 8 reviews, YA author Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Conclusions: African-American authors are popular around here. So are sf authors. African-American sf authors are very popular. No one is afraid of intense and dark material, but romance and teen angst is also nice. And being President doesn't hurt review counts, but writing sf might boost them even more - around here, at least. ;)

Kawabata Yasunari -- The Master of Go

[jain]

7. Kawabata Yasunari, The Master of Go

A brilliant book, looking at the last competitive game of the elderly twenty-first holder of the Honinbou title against a young challenger. The novel balances scenes that develop characterization (both during and outside the game) with the exigencies of a plot that hinges upon the measured placement of successive go stones.

The familiar metaphors of go as battle and go as conversation are explored deftly in several scenes, while elsewhere the narrative takes a pragmatic look at the miscommunication possible even between high-ranked players enjoying a certain degree of familiarity with each other.

'The Emperor's Babe' by Bernadine Evaristo

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I got the 'Emperor's Babe' based on a recommendation here - I can't remember who it came from, but whoever it was, I'd like to thank you. I'd never have picked this book on my own, I was very doubtful when I started reading it, but I'm now really really glad I did.

'The Emporor's Babe' is a historical novel in verse, set in Roman London and featuring a Sudanese heroine, who has an affair with the Roman Emperor. It's this amazing mix of the historically accurate (there was an African presence in Roman Britain, which, randomly, makes the fantastically mixed cast of Merlin more historical accurate than the swords they are using!), and the deliberately anachronistic (references to modern designer labels, 'mockney' accents), all put into this freeflowing and surprisingly accessible verse. The flow of the words and the language is just wonderful, and at times I found myself reading it aloud, just to get the sound of it right. I would love to see this novel turned into a play, actually.

The story is also glorious. It somehow manages to fill the criteria for 'Greek tragedy' (the story is so sad, and so inevitable), 'young adult', and 'historical novel', with added 'chick lit' added in. The basic outline of the story is that Zuleika, a teenage girl, born to Sudanese (or Nubian, as the novel refers to them as) parents in London is married off at the age of 11 to a wealthy Roman, much older than her. She is petted, spoilt, but ultimately imprisoned in a loveless and, by modern day standards, abusive relationship. Then she meets the Emperor - Septimius Severus who was randomly, the first African Roman Emperor. They begin an affair, which will eventually bring about Zuleika's downfall.

I loved this book, and now I've finished it I'm going to go back and read it again. I want to recommend it to everyone, but I'm very aware that some people really won't like it. The poetry is very accessible, but it definitely does taking some getting used to, and Zuleika is very much a teenage girl, with a bunch of teenage quirks which can be a bit frustrating at times. Still, for me, she felt very real, and the sheer energy of her voice did carry me along.

So, highly recommended, if you're up for something a little bit different.

#3: A Soldier's Play, by Charles Fuller

[whereweather.livejournal.com]

A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller
1982

This play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It's set in an Army training camp in the deep South (Louisiana) in 1944, during the Second World War, and it is, at least in one sense, a murder mystery.  Vernon Waters, a black sergeant who was responsible for a group of black enlisted men, has been found shot to death outside the base's nightclub.  Who did it?  One of the white Southern officers, resentful of "uppity negroes" in the forces?  Klansmen from the nearby town?  One of Waters' own men? 

The Army sends an investigator to look into the death: Captain Davenport, an Army lawyer and the first black officer most of the men on the base have ever seen.  Davenport sets about interviewing all of Waters' men, one by one, trying to learn about the complex dynamics that existed within this group of men from many different backgrounds and parts of the country, and between them and the white officers who rank above them all.  All this, and he also has to contend with Captain Taylor: the men's well-intentioned commanding officer, who is furious that Headquarters sent a Negro to investigate -- because, he says, he wants justice for Waters, and the people around here will never let a white man be brought to justice on a black man's word...

If the play were a paint-by-numbers piece "about race," or "about racism," of course it wouldn't be very good (though I suppose it might be educational).  But the characters come alive, the tension runs high, and so what you see is humans in history navigating through a minefield of restrictions, assumptions, fears and aspirations that for a contemporary reader (at least, for me) are in many ways as foreign as another culture or country.  I added a tag "institutionalized racism" to this one, because it's hard for me to explain how strange and shocking it is to read about this essentially pre-integrated Army -- when as long as I've been alive the Army has seemed like one of the most relatively egalitarian, and indeed integrated, of our national institutions.  But it wasn't always that way, not even sixty years ago...

Anyway, I recommend this play to people interested in, well, in any of the elements I've mentioned.  I think I give it three and a half out of five stars.

Also, a tangential note: The copy of the play that I read listed in its front matter the cast of the 1982 opening production in New York, which featured not only Denzel Washington but also Samuel L. Jackson.  That seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me.  But then I wondered if perhaps the available roles for black actors were so few that it was not too surprising that the cream of the nation's acting talent would be concentrated in a single mostly-black New York production.  Then I wondered to what extent that has changed between then and today.

10. Our Twisted Hero by Yi Munyol and 11. I Say a Little Prayer by E. Lynn Harris

[sumofparts.livejournal.com]

I picked up these two randomly from the library. Our Twisted Hero was on the table promoting Asian Heritage Month at the library. Link here for reading suggestions. I Say a Little Prayer was on a shelf in the hardcover fiction section.

( Cut for length and potential spoilers )

Note about tagging: I've added a "translation" tag but haven't tagged the (white) translator although his name is noted in my post.

#4. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Scott Pilgrim #5), by Bryan Lee O'Malley

[whereweather.livejournal.com]

Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Scott Pilgrim #5), Bryan Lee O'Malley
2009, Oni Press

Oh, man, you've got to love Scott Pilgrim!  This is totally another of those books I was going to have read anyway, but what the hey, they count too.  (They do, right?  They've got to.)

Since this is the fifth installment of a planned-6-volume series, it's hard to know how to give it a review in a way that will make sense to people who don't follow it.  Allow me to point out, though, that everyone probably should try reading it, and if you don't like it that's fine.  I mean, I don't usually like hip stuff either.  I'm too old and cranky for that.  But the series is so funny and odd, and the graphisme (sorry) simultaneously so minimalist and so creative, that it's really hard not to enjoy it.  Even though I know I probably wouldn't like any of these people in real life.  (Except Wallace Wells, maybe, and that's a weird thought all by itself.)

The series' protagonist is the eponymous Scott Pilgrim, who is 23 at the story's outset -- he turns 24 in the latest volume (NO PEOPLE THAT IS NOT A SPOILER) -- and is friendly, cute, charming, charismatic, super white, and also immature and really pretty dumb.  But he has supportive parents and some interesting friends, and in the first book he falls for a much more mature and interesting (and American!) girl named Ramona Flowers, who is a subspace delivery person for Amazon.ca, and also Scott plays in a band, but Ramona has seven evil exes who Scott will have to battle if he wants to be able to date her, but fortunately that shouldn't be too much of a problem because... well, I guess you have to read Book 1 to the end to find out why.  Also, Scott is dating a high schooler named Knives Chau, and lives with his gay best friend and sugar daddy Wallace Wells (but they don't sleep together (even though they sleep together)).  But all things change.

Oh!  And it's all in Toronto!

Book Five has lots more of our favorite characters, an ever-more-developed and assured graphisme, more Asian people, and robots.  And I won't give anything beyond that away.  Four out of five stars.  I continue to groove on this series.

(One more question for the fans out there: Was I wrong in believing Wallace Wells is Asian?  Or half-Asian, anyway?  Because I read they've cast Kieran Culkin as him in the movie, and now I'm just baffled.)