After posting my list below, while I have a 60/40 male/female split, I have a 80/20 white/POC split (or 90/10 depending on how Mischa Berlinksi self-identifies). Not particularly diverse, so I decided to think of a list of Ten Books That Stuck With Me: POC Edition. Even having read thousands of books as a child, this list is harder and is composed almost entirely of books that I read aged twenty-one and up; much like my 80/20 white/POC split in the previous list, we have eighty percent of the list below was read once I achieved adulthood. Brief tangent: In five years of high school, we read zero books by POC and only one plus epsilon books by women: To Kill a Mockingbird and some Emily Dickinson poems. Then, as we were Canadian, our education system deemed that the one and only Canadian novel in the entire fire year syllabus be set in the US: Shoeless Joe. I need to channel my inner Kat arguing with the English teacher and invent a time machine and go back and complain more in high school.
Still, I lived with the Internet since 1995 and a library card since I was a baby. I could have looked harder for diverse literature and didn’t. I can only blame so much on the education system (as much as I would like to blame everything). So these are the Ten Books That Stuck With Me: POC-penned edition, most of which I read in my twenties since I read pretty white before that.
-
White Teeth by Zadie Smith: I saw this book for an entire summer in 2001. We’d go to the bookstore, that Chapters with the escalators down by MuchMusic that I don’t think is there anymore. I wasn’t buying contemporary fiction that summer. I bought Gunter Grass and Doestoevskii and stacked them up next to my bed instead. I only twigged to this book because Vision TV was played the miniseries a few years later and I was visiting my grandmother and read about it in the TV guide that comes free with the newspaper. TV Times I think? Does that still exist? I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper since 2000.
For a long time, White Teeth was my favourite book. It isn’t any more, but it’s in the top five. I’ll likely never be as talented as Zadie Smith or have such a cool name as Zadie and it hurts to recognize that, but every now and then I reread White Teeth and figure that’s okay. At least Zadie Smith is out there, even if I can’t be her myself.
-
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor: In grade nine, we read To Kill A Mockingbird in school. That was a waste. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the book you should read in grade nine about race in America: a book about racism in the south written by an African-American. How revolutionary is that! (end sarcasm).
-
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: This is a book about how sometimes things come together in a way that they could never come together again. Think of the book’s ending when they walk by each other, the awkwardness. You can’t step in the same river twice. I read this book after coming back from Costa Rica (the first time in 2005, not the most recent trip in 2013) and Costa Rica was all about one moment in time where I was emptied out.
-
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordechai Richler: As a child in England, my mother made sure we read this book and that we knew that, like the characters in the book, we were Canadians living in London. We were not Londoners or Brits or anything but Canadian. We weren’t allowed to say Telly unless in reference to the muppet. This was the bulwark she put up against forgetting Canada, even though we had non-posh British accents where th‘s are pronounced like f‘s.
When we had moved back to Canada, my aunt gave us the sequel for Christmas. It wasn’t the same.
-
A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar: This book I heard about in Bitch and was surprised the library had a copy. The parts in the Middle East are far stronger than the American ones, and the novel goes from lazing to ultra-super-sonic-fast-forward once they get to the US. Still, sitting on a balcony in Alexandria staring out at the sea. A whole book could be written just on that scene. I waited until my niece was old enough and then bought her a copy. I’m the weird relative who sends books that I’m sure no one reads.
-
The Good Women of China by Xue Xinran: This book I read the first month I moved to Halifax, taken out from a library that no longer exists. Another random selection. I walked into the library and picked it off the shelf, along with a book on happiness that advocated quite strongly about taking illegal drugs to achieve that state. The happiness book I didn’t finish (although perhaps if I had, I’d be a happier person). Ten years later, I still think of the stories, two in particular: a girl squashing flies into an open wound to keep it infected so she doesn’t have to return to her sexually abusive parents and women in a remote part of China who, when given disposable menstrual products for the first time, don’t use them themselves; rather they are given/taken by the men of the community to wear as adornments. Another book that made me sad.
-
Choose Me by Evelyn Lau: I talked earlier this year about Choose Me, how I read it and at the time I read it, it was one of those books that made me want to write, but reading it again now, as an adult, it’s easier for me to see the flaws I didn’t see when I was younger. Still, this is one of the books that made me want to be a writer and will always have a spot inside me just for that.
-
Look For Me by Edeet Ravel: I always think this is the third book in the Tel Aviv trilogy and whenever I re-read the trilogy, I always read this one last. I don’t particularly like the actual third book, and while the first one is likely a better novel, I identify with Look For Me the most. The full page ads in the newspaper saying I will never ever ever ever forget you or stop looking. The entire miscommunication of the plots between everyone. This novel always hurts, no matter how often, how many times I read it.
-
The Banquet Bug by Geling Yan: I picked this book up randomly from the New Acquisitions table at Keshen Goodman without having heard anything about it. I don’t even think I read the jacket synopsis or any of the blurbs. I don’t even like the cover, so I was definitely not judging the book by that. I was tired and had a new baby and was grabbing whatever I could to get out of there as fast as possible. I probably wanted dim sum too. I miss dim sum. I want a big steamed bun with red pork inside and I want a savoury pancake with duck sauce. That is what I want.
This is a book about a man who forges journalism credentials to sneak into free banquets given by companies/governmental departments in China, which is a pretty audacious concept for a novel. I read the synopsis on Amazon just now, and I don’t remember anything of what that synopsis says. Instead I remember food and concept and sneaking into free Chinese banquets, which is what I would like to do.
-
The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brandon Skyhorse: I’m not usually a fan of the intertwined short story collection. I like all random stories or novels, which is somewhat hilarious as the only way I’m every going to get to novel length is to do the interconnected short story thing. But these interconnected stories, bit by bit, reveal the whole picture, and at the end, it’s like your neighbourhood. You know these people. They are with you always.
