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[personal profile] opusculasedfera
Evidence of Being: The Black, Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence by Darius Bost
An account of Black, gay artistic communities in the 80s and 90s and their activism and art. Introduced me to several writers I hadn't heard of before and made me see the ones I had heard of in their community context. A great counter to often white-specific narratives of AIDS, plus some excellent discussion of how AIDS wasn't the only thing these communities were facing at the time.

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez
Essays on a variety of subjects including race, family, language, writing, etc. An interesting autobiographical perspective on a writer I've heard about, but whose fiction I haven't actually read. Most of the immigration narratives I've read have been either from earlier or later, whereas Alvarez' family immigrated from the Dominican to the States in 1960, so that was very interesting to me.

Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop by Imani Perry
In depth music criticism of various hip-hop artists. Excellently argued. I don't personally know a lot about music, let alone hip-hop, but she definitely makes the case that hip-hop is as sprawling as any other genre and deserves the same level of critical analysis. I think needing to make that point is slightly dated, but it wasn't as much in 2004, and it's useful to know where to look for a concise expression of her argument.

My Soul Looks Back by Jessica B. Harris
A memoir of (mostly) the author's time on the fringes of the Black artistic circle in NYC that included Baldwin, Angelou, Morrison, etc. in the 70s. A slightly awkward book because the author's primary connection to this circle was as the much younger girlfriend of Samuel Floyd, so her perspective is at once overwhelmed by how cool and famous all these people are, and curiously detached from the actual things going on within that circle except for the surface interactions (i.e. X and Y were besties, Y and Z were frenemies level stuff). It's odd because Harris is a moderately famous food writer in her own right, but the entire arc of her career is narratively subsumed by how excited she is to tell you about the people she knew in the 70s. She appears to go from being a girl with a BA working on the edges of publishing to a writer with many books under her belt without doing much other than hanging around these famous people and I know that's not true, it's just that she elides so much in this book. She does write great descriptions of food, and some of the best parts of the book are about her various culinary triumphs and disasters as she tries to entertain her new friends to the degree she thinks they deserve, but I'm not sure it's worth reading just for that. Also, Floyd may have been artistically and politically important in his own right, but he also sounds like a fucking terrible boyfriend and I'm so over reading about bad heterosexual relationships, especially ones with a significant age gap that the older person seems to have done little to mitigate.

Everything's Trash, But It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson
Humorous essays on every topic that pops into Robinson's head. Whether or not you enjoy this one depends on whether or not you enjoy Robinson's super casual tone and the awkward amount of personal detail she likes to give you. I think she's very funny, but sometimes it was a little too much information about exactly which actors she'd like to bone.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Essays on writing, being Korean-American, trauma, and a bunch of other things. Beautiful lyrical writing that lulls you in and then smacks you in the face with something heavy. On the strength of this collection, I suspect his novels of being amazing and also too dark for me, but I would happily read any further essays he'd like to write.
sumofparts: picture of books with text 'books are humanity in print' (books)
[personal profile] sumofparts
Sort of a mid-year update. It's been a while since I read some of these so I've just written short impressions but feel free to ask about any of the books.

33. Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali
34. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
35. The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
36. Valmiki's Daughter by Shani Mootoo
37. Skim written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki
38. Henry Chow and other stories edited by R. David Stephens (white)

Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali
This was a well-written book but ultimately disappointing because it just didn't feel like it was going anywhere. Judging from the Goodreads reviews, this was a departure from Brick Lane, which I'll still try eventually.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Like other posters on the comm, I enjoyed this book but it was not without its flaws, which I think everyone else has covered pretty well.

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
I liked the book but I don't feel everything gelled very well for me. I did like how the main character wasn't always the most sympathetic.

Valmiki's Daughter by Shani Mootoo
Gorgeous writing and evocative descriptions but similar to The New Moon's Arms, something didn't quite click for me. Still, I'd definitely try this author's other books.

Skim written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.
Very detailed and beautiful drawings that really capture the story. Equal credit should be given to author and illustrator.

Henry Chow and Other Stories by various authors, edited by R. David Stephens
Enjoyable but uneven collection of short stories for teenagers. I liked the different story settings and character perspectives. From the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop.

tags:
a: ali monica, a: hopkinson nalo, a: mootoo shani, a: mariko tamaki, i: tamaki jillian, w-e: stephens r david, short stories, fantasy, lit fic, young adult, coming of age, graphic novel, bangladeshi-british, latin@, dominican-american, caribbean-canadian, jamaican, trinidadian, asian-canadian, chinese-canadian, japanese-canadian, glbt, women writers
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[identity profile] kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com
Title: How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay
Author: Julia Alvarez
Number of Pages: 147 pages
My Rating: 3/5

Jacket Summary: When Miguel's Tia Lola comes from the Dominican Republic to Vermont to help out his Mami, Miguel is worried that his unusual aunt will make it even more difficult to make new friends. It's been hard enough moving from New York City and Leaving Papi behind. Sometimes he wishes Tia Lola would go back to the island. But then he wouldn't have the treats she's putting in his lunch box, which he's sure helped him make the baseball team. And she really needs his help to learn English so she doesn't use all the words she knows at once: "One-way -caution-you're-welcome-thanks-for-asking." So Miguel changes his wish to a new one, and he finally even figures out a clever way to make it come true.

Review: This is a kids' book and while it's cute and I liked it well enough, it's not really one of those kids' books that's terribly enjoyable for an adult. At least not to me.

Title: Ties That Bind, Ties That Break
Author: Lensey Namioka
Number of Pages: 154 pages
My Rating: 4/5

Jacket Summary: Third Sister in the Tao family, Ailin has watched her two older sisters having their feet bound. In China in 1911, all girls of good families follow this ancient practice, which is also an extremely painful one. Ailin loves to run away from her governess and play games with her male cousins. Knowing she will never run again once her feet are bound, she refuses to follow this torturous tradition. As a result, the family of her intended husband breaks their marriage agreement. As she enters adolescence, Ailin finds that her family, shamed by her decision, will no longer support her. Chinese society leaves few options for a single woman of good family, but with bold conviction and an indomitable spirit, Ailin is determined to forge her own destiny.

Review: I enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of many turn-of-the-century girls' stories I read as a kid, like Anne of Green Gables and stuff.
[identity profile] tala-tale.livejournal.com
The Ancestors, a collection of three novellas by L.A. Banks, Tananarive Due, and Brandon Massey.

I was seriously underwhelmed by this collection. I couldn't even manage to finish the stories by Banks or Massey. Slightly spoilery review behind the cut. )

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

This one is definitely worth reading. It wasn't really what I expected, at all, and I confess that I would've been happier had the ending been more... a resolution of the central issue in the story... but I'm learning that that desire for tidy closure is very much a product of growing up on European fairy tales and their ilk, so I'm trying to outgrow it. The book is full of intriguing characters, really pushed me to the limits of my comprehension of Spanish (I spent a lot of time with my dictionary!), was both spare and lyrical at the same time somehow, and was absolutely memorable. I highly recommend it.

(Edited to include tags ).)
[identity profile] sairaali.livejournal.com
I'm awful at doing writeups, so this list has just been sitting on my desktop for ages making me feel guilty for not doing writeups.

Soo, I will just put the list up with brief one-liners on whether I liked it or not, and I'd be happy to discuss more in comments.

5) Silver Pheonix by Cindy Pon
Fantasy, adventure, romance, dragons, goddesses, intrigue! What's not to love?

6) Bodies in Motion by Maryanne Mohanraj
This is more of a series of interrelated short stories than a novel. The stories follow three generations of two families who immigrate from Sri Lanka to the US. It portrays a mix of different immigrant experiences, although nearly all of the characters are solidly middle or upper-middle class. The style is very ethereal and dreamy.

7) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
This has been reviewed here a million times. I enjoyed it, but found the casual sexism a bit grating.

8) My Life as a Rhombus by Varian Johnson
If I thought Oscar Wao had a few problematic scenes wrt to gender, holy wow, it was nothing compared to this. Neither the narrator nor any of the characters question the basic assumption that a woman needs a man to love her and that only a domineering man could possibly handle loving a strong independent woman. The story itself was well crafted and tightly written, but I couldn't get past the sexism.

9) Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor
Love! A young girl with the ability to speak to shadows struggles with her community's distrust and fear of female Shadow Speakers, a result of her estranged father's dictatorial and regressive policies. When her father is publicly beheaded, her world is turned inside out, and she embarks on a quest of self-discovery that takes her far away from home, during which she discovers a major military plot against her home.

Girls with cat eyes! Talking camels! Magic plants that grow into houses! A girl meets a strange orphan boy with his own powers and secrets on her quest without a queasy romance subplot being introduced! Again, what's not to love?

10)And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women Ed: Muneez Shamshie
Definitely would recommend this. Like any anthology, some of the stories are so-so, some are fantastic.


And I know this comm is focused on books by POC, but I know there are a bunch of SFF fans here and I'd like to make some anti-recs. I found the following books at the $1 ARC sale at Wiscon, and I suggest giving them all a miss for skeevy race issues.
Stone Voice Rising by C Lee Tocci - pseudo-Natives with magic powers just for being Native, and also misappropriational mishmash of at least six different tribes' religious beliefs, that I could recognize. Kokopelli become Popokelli, a demented fae creature who betrays his species and sells out to the (literal) Devil.
Kop and Ex-Kop by Warren Hammond - Locals on a backwater economically depressed planet are being murdered by a serial killer from the orbiting space station, which has technology centuries advanced of what is available planetside. Oh and incidentally, all the space dwellers have perfect milky white skin and the planet dwellers are all dark. Bleck.
[identity profile] anait.livejournal.com
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

I thought this book was fantastic. I highly recommend it!

My favourite thing about this book was the prose. It's half in English, one quarter in Spanish and one quarter in geek. I'm fluent in English, much less so in classic sci-fi, comic books, RPG's and Tolkien, and not at all in Spanish. It didn't matter. Context is everything, and I picked up new words as I went along. The prose was bursting with life and energy. I'd start a chapter and get sucked in by the narration; wouldn't be able to put the book down until that section was over. The writing is sometimes irreverent and satirical (the dictator of the Dominican Republic is referred to as 'the Failed Cattle Thief' and 'Fuckface') and sometimes very moving. It made me think of an older post by [livejournal.com profile] cupidsbow. She talks in one part of the post about the power of writing in the vernacular vs. 'literary' English in fiction (and fanfiction).

So, the story. It's a multi-generational tale of the de Leon family, who are under a particularly awful curse, or 'fuku.' Whether you believe in the supernatural or not is irrelevant. The author leaves it to the reader to decide if the events that play out are from the fuku, or are due to the misfortune that falls on everyday people living under a brutal dictatorship. The story starts out in New Jersey with Oscar de Leon, the protagonist, but also contains sequences about the earlier lives of his mother and grandfather in the Dominican Republic.

Oscar is not a likeable protagonist, he does little that made me like him, but he did have my sympathy in certain moments. The narrator, Yunior, seems to be a loose autobiographical stand-in for Junot Diaz, although I haven't Googled any interviews for the author and may be completely wrong. (ETA: Wrong!) There is a lot of sexism in the narration and in the story which Junot Diaz says is cultural, and it seems to be as damaging to the men as it is to the women. Because of this, it was a relief to be able to read the sections that were built around Lola, Oscar's sister, and Beli, their mother; to get more of the women's lives and thoughts, even through Yunior's narration.

The way that the story unfolds is great, being educated in Dominican history was also great, and after you are done the book you may like to read this review by Abigail Nussbaum (contain spoilers), which is much, much more interesting and in-depth than mine. (I got the link from an earlier review in this community. Thank you!)
[identity profile] osprey-archer.livejournal.com
Julia Alvarez’s Before We Were Free, like her In the Time of the Butterflies, is a novel set in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Trujillo. However, it’s a more successful novel than In the Time of the Butterflies; while both novels focus more on family drama than on politics, the approach works better in Before We Were Free.

This is probably because Before We Were Free is a children’s novel. It would be unrealistic for our narrator, Anita, to know much more than she does about the brewing rebellion against the dictatorship. Therefore, the focus on family with just the hum of politics in the background seems natural.

While Before We Were Free is a better novel than Before We Were Free, I still wouldn’t say it’s remarkable. It’s well constructed, and the characters’ relationships are well-drawn—particularly Anita’s early crushes and her relationship with her mother—but there’s nothing to make it outstanding.

Also, there's a loyal Haitian servant who talks to the spirit world who might ping some racial buttons.
[identity profile] cyphomandra.livejournal.com
The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50. This is a very careful, balanced novel – the metaphor throughout is that of the labyrinth, with the beast at its heart, but the danger is not so much the monster itself as the ever-present possibility of losing your way. Anthony Witherspoon comes back to Harlem after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, to find new gaps between himself and his friends there; of most concern is his girlfriend Gabi, who has become distant from both Spoon and the Gabi he remembers.

It would have been easy to tell this story as a standard problem novel and flatten the characters out to fit; what it is instead is a story not just about individuals with problems, but about the different communities they inhabit, and how some people manage to move between them, while others are lost. Nicely done.
[identity profile] vash137.livejournal.com
I was recommended to this community by a friend, and I'm very excited to enjoy such a wealth of recommendations of books by people of color as well as share about the books I'm reading. Though I'm excited to read 50 more books by people of color, I'll probably also share some reviews of previous books that I've read and loved.

Currently, I'm in the middle of The Brief And Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. It was recommended to me by a number of friends and I'm really enjoying it. The book employs a lovely mix of comic tone and seriousness, and I feel as though I am being given a glimpse into Dominican culture that is both new to me and wildly interesting. I also love the high degree of nerdiness that permeates the book (as someone who is highly nerdy myself) 

I'm also reading a manga called Nana by Ai Yazawa. (do we talk about manga here?)  It's entertaining in a highly girly way.  I'm usually not really into shoujo (for girls in Japanese) but I wanted to try something new and it looked interesting.

I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone and participating in this community.

Love and hugs :-)
Vash
[identity profile] billies-blues.livejournal.com
I'm excited about this community and this challenge. I hope I can do it in a month. I'm going to start by counting the book I read last month.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Much like everyone else, I fell in love with this book. It was hard for me to put down. Even the characters I found hard to take, were made a little relatable as I continued reading. 
The Third Life of Copeland Grange by Alice Walker...I have read this book already. I believe it was her first novel.

I am looking forward to finding book ideas through this community and am glad to have joined.

Edit: I also meant to add Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. This story is amazing, dark, funny. It's mystical, futuristic and yet has an old feeling to it.

So two read, one current.
ext_3152: Cartoon face of badgerbag with her tongue sticking out and little lines of excitedness radiating. (Default)
[identity profile] badgerbag.livejournal.com
I bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on [livejournal.com profile] ethereal_lad's recommendation but was afraid it would be too literary for me, too New Yorker-ish and twee.

No! Not at all!

It's GREAT! I was drawn in immediately. By page 3 I was laughing hysterically and yelping to everyone in the house about the fantastic characters, the jokes, and the footnotes which are half about Dominican history and half quotes from the Silmarillion. Oscar's story, his sister's, his mom's, U.S. pop culture, geek culture, the history of Trujillo and the politics of the D.R. for the rest of the century, everything mixes up together to build an amazing, intense, and deeply nerdy view of the world. If you're a science fiction or comic book or role playing game geek, bump this book up to the top of your reading list.

Don't worry about not getting the Spanish bits, that is what the Internet is for. Look it up if you must. But you can enjoy the book without knowing what "carajo" or "coñazo" means. It's just more fun if you do know.

Note that you can buy it in Spanish if you like.

ALSO

I just noticed Junot Díaz is really, really cute.

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[identity profile] kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com
I finally finished this last night, and while I did have some problems with it, overall I enjoyed it. Amazon has some good, non-spoilery summaries of the plot, so I'll just move on to my own impressions here.

It reminded me somewhat of Middlesex, in that in addition to the main character's story, it also tells the story of the parents and grandparents. Oscar Wao is only a bit over 300 pages, and yet I never felt like it was rushed, even with a story spanning three generations (and giving time to Oscar's sister Lola as well, and later in the book even the narrator becomes a character in the story, though he is still focusing on Oscar and Lola rather than himself). Diaz has a nice, tight style that I really like. Very conversational, but not padded. It felt a little slow at first, and it was easy to put down and walk away from for days at a time, but about a third of the way in, I started finding it really hard to put down.

It almost feels like it's written in three languages. English, of course, with a ton of Spanish words and phrases (which are easy enough to figure out via context if you don't know Spanish (or like me, have forgotten most of what you learned)), but there are also so many geek references thrown in that it feels like that's a third language as well. I really enjoyed the style of it.

There are a lot of footnotes, which I both liked and disliked. I liked them, because I did end up learning a lot about the history of the Dominican Republic, which I sadly knew nothing about before (the most I can say is that the name Trujillo rang a bell, though I would not have been able to tell you what country he had ruled). But I do dislike getting interrupted in the middle of reading to have to go read a footnote.

As for what was actually problematic... (no spoilers) )

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