Who am I missing?

[vass]

So, pursuant to my previous post, I want to make my list of 'classic novels' I'm reading this year more diverse. I started with a list by Susan Wise Bauer that was very white and male, and added more women and authors of colour to the mix, but I've now decided that I didn't go far enough. This year's list ranges from 1895-2000, and I don't want to go any earlier than that because I'm reading in chronological order, and I did 1605-1895 last year. OTOH, I am strongly considering dipping back and reading The Tale of Genji because I strongly regret not reading it last year, as the first novel in history.


Here's the list. Authors of colour in bold.

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Zorah Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, maybe
Richard Wright, Native Son
Albert Camus, The Stranger
George Orwell, 1984 (reread)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Don Delillo, White Noise
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Total books: 26 (not counting rereads)
Total authors of colour: 10


As you see, I need at three more authors to make my list only half white. They should have some claim to be mainstream classics. They should all be novels, not short stories, essays, memoirs, poetry, or plays. This is because I'll be doing other types of literature in other years: this year is just about novels. I would prefer authors who aren't already listed.

I'm thinking James Baldwin for one, but I'm not sure which book of his. I've already read Another Country. I was thinking Giovanni's Room, but it only has white characters, and that seems like cheating.

Who am I missing?

Edited to add:
I've settled on three novels to add to my list:
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Comments

[nwhyte]

Since you're obviously allowed SF (from 1984 and The Satanic Verses) what about Samuel R. Delany? Dhalgren being his best known book. Or Octavia Butler for that matter.

Also a couple of Booker Prize winners from India that I have read: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

Two others I enjoyed in the last year or so: Out by Natsuo Kirino, which won awards for best mystery novel of the year in Japan and is a fantastic book, and A House for Mr Biswas by Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul.

(Did Jean Rhys count herself as a person of colour?)

[vass]

I didn't even know The Satanic Verses was SF.

I've added Arundhati Roy to my list.

I don't know how Rhys self-identified, but her mother was Creole, and that was certainly an important part of her identity.

[papertigers.livejournal.com]

outside the U.S., "Creole" does not necessarily denote "person of color"; it's frequently used to refer to people of European descent born in the West Indies. Rhys' biographies all identify her as White and specifically discuss the impact that growing up as a White person in a predominantly Black community had on her early life experiences and her later writing.

[vass]

Thanks for explaining. Looks like I'll need a fourth book, then. Lucky for me so many people posted suggestions!

[karenhealey.livejournal.com]

I second the recommendation for The God of Small Things for lit fic. One of my favourite books of all time, and I am not much of a lit fic fan.

Short list of possible authors

[trude.livejournal.com]

Nawal El-Saadawi
Naguib Mahfouz
Haruki Murakami
Edwidge Danticat
Kenzaburo Oe*
Pramoedya Ananta Toer*


*I have not read anything by these authors, but I think they qualify as "mainstream classics".

Re: Short list of possible authors

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Murakami's who I was thinking of, too.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Please note: (British) "classic" status does not imply my personal endorsement.

Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi

More later when I've had coffee. :-)

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Pick one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohinton_Mistry

Pick one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryl_Phillips

A 2004 novel about 1948: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Island

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Had to google the novel cos he's better known, especially to me, for poetry: The Interpreters, Wole Soyinka.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Famished Road, Ben Okri

James Baldwin is probably best known for Another Country but my friends prefer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni%27s_Room and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Beale_Street_Could_Talk

Something by Sharman Alexie? Louise Erdrich? Leslie Marmon Silko? (Not my place to judge these.)

Think I'm done now, heh.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

* Sherman Alexie

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

If you still want some classic lit, try The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, pere.

(I hate the Musketeers - far too sexist for me. But the Count! I luvs the Count!)

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Yes, also Pushkin.

[sheafrotherdon.livejournal.com]

For American Indian authors, you could start with any work by any of the following. (I've suggested titles that might match the idea of "a mainstream classic" - although that terminology's hard to work with in this case.)

Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine
LeAnne Howe - Shell Shaker
James Welch - Fools Crow
N. Scott Momaday - House Made of Dawn
Leslie Marmon Silko - Ceremony
Thomas King - Green Grass Running Water
Joseph Boyden - Through Black Spruce (although that's since 2000)
Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues (Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven is somewhere between a set of short stories and a novel, since all the stories are interconnected)
Susan Power - The Grass Dancer
Linda Hogan - Mean Spirit

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

LOVE MEDICINE. So so so good. So good. And House Made of Dawn, my god, the language--it's hard to follow, or it was for me, but it's amazing.

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

More African novelists: Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Flora Nwapa.

to answer your actual question:

[papertigers.livejournal.com]

authors I can recommend that aren't already listed:
Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place*
Ernest Gaines (A Gathering of Old Men*; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman*)
Jean Toomer
Bebe Moore Campbell (Your Blues Ain't Like Mine*)
Claude McKay
Chester Himes (A Hero Ain't Nothin' But A Sandwich*)
Margaret Walker
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Ntozake Shange (Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo*)

*favorites/novels that I'd consider classic/essential reads for these authors

[rose71.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this! There are so many great suggestions in the comments, and your final list looks wonderful.

I just want to second the comment, above, on Jean Rhys: she was very emphatic in identifying herself (and the "Creole" heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea) as white. The term "Creole" is interestingly ambiguous, since it can mean either "mixed race and culture" or "white person born in the colonies." And Rhys was using the second definition. So I'd suggest taking Rhys off your list of writers of color. However, her book is such a fascinating exploration of racial identity in the Caribbean and England, so it fits really well with the goals that are guiding your fantastic reading list!

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

How about Toni Morrison? Beloved, possibly?

[jain]

You forgot to bold Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who's Latino. Other book suggestions:

Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Kawabata Yasunari, The Sound of the Mountain
Lao She, Rickshaw Boy
Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy, Children of Gebelawi
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Tanazaki Jun'ichiro, The Makioka Sisters

[vass]

I thought Gabriel Garcia Marquez was Latin American but white, same as Borges and Gorodischer. I'd be happy to be corrected on that.

[blackteensread2.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Anything by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison. The Wedding by Dorthoy west, Passing by Nella Larsen. I second Kindred by Octavia Bulter (not tha I've read it yet *is ashamed*)

Great list and recs in the comments!

~Ari

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

A lot of the poc books on your list seem like more recent ones, so if you want to add any from the early 20th century, I know lots of Japanese authors available in English: Natsume Souseki, Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, Mishima Yukio, Tanizaki Junichirou, etc.