When's the last time you read books like these?

[Queen Michael]

Most of the literature I read is not English originally - not because I'm some kind of snob, but just because I enjoy a lot of genres that are better represented in Spanish, Italian, German, and other languages. Julio Cortazar from Argentina, Italo Calvino from Italy, and Kafka are my favorite authors. Also Yukio Mishima from Japan! You all should check them out!

Damn, I'm impressed! I've read all those writers! Well, I'm not done with Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller yet, though. And I love Cortázar!

 

[Queen Michael]

The last one I think was The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared (dat title) a year or so ago. It's Swedish originally, read the English version. Hilarious little novel, very good, comes recommended.

You read that one? =D Here in Sweden, everybody, and I mean EVERYbody, read that book a couple of years ago when it first came out. Me included, and I loved it. The sort-of-sequel came out last year. I actually preferred that one.

Really now? Which one would that be, I'd love to read it.

I don't think it's been translated into any language yet. It's called Analfabeten som kunde räkna, "The analphabet that could count."

 

[Happiness Assassin]

To number 1, I remember reading a book by W.E.B Dubois a few years ago, but I couldn't begin to tell you what it was called. Mainly a collection of Martin Luther King Jr.'s letters and notes over the years.

To number 2, well... does the Odyssey count? Frankly, most of the translated literature I have read is centuries old, at least. I find myself more a fan of British and American literature and haven't read much else. No, wait I read Les Miserables a while back, though I really didn't like it. To many damn digressions.

 

[Ken Sapp]

I'm curious about this, so let's hear it. When did you last read:

1. A novel by a black writer.

2. A translated novel, written by a foreign writer.

1.Don't know and don't particularly care. I most likely have considering how many books I have read over the years but I tend to read what interests me, follow series from start to finish, and authors I really enjoy will get an entry in my "Keep an eye out for" list. Skin color, Gender and Ethnicity rarely if ever enter my considerations when looking for a book to read.

2. Other than the Illiad and Odyssey(from Ancient Greek http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1375.The_Iliad_The_Odyssey), and the Tale of Genji (from 11th century Japan http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7042.The_Tale_of_Genji) I can't say for certain that I have read many books which were translated from another language. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is in my queue but I haven't got around to it yet.

 

[sageoftruth]

To answer your question, I think it says that most of us don't know many black writers. As far as novelists about non-race-related issues go, I can't name any. I don't think it says anything about the readers, but it might say something about publishers or the process of getting a book published. I've never tried to get a book published, so I don't know how true that is.

Another thing is, here in the western world, white people certainly got a head start in becoming famous writers. In the US, I doubt that there were any black people getting books published before the emancipation proclamation. Considering how many classic novelists existed before then, that's a huge head start.

 

[Colour Scientist]

Song of Solomon and Passing were the last two books I read by black authors.
Fantastic novels, that was a few years ago though.

As for translated foreign language novels, probably The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequel. I made it half-way through the third before I lost interest.

 

[grey_space]

No clue as to a black author. I read a lot of stuff off my kindle now so they could all be fucking bright green for all I know.

So as far as I'm concerned that's a non-issue.

As for 'foreign' writers...

I'm Irish so apart from the odd pretentious poet or 'pithy' ex-pat social commenter every English speaking writer is a foreigner to me, and write from a mildly alien perspective.

As for non-English speaking writers....

THe guy who wrote The Achemist and all that shite, The Witcher Series, The Night/Day watch series, Metro Series, I've read War and Peace, and Doctor Zhivago, as well as Crime and Punishment. I've read a lot of Voltaire and Dumas(I would consider him 'French' rather than 'black' in respect to his writing.), Nietche, Freud, Yung, And a little DeCartes.

I've read very little Asian stuff; Mushashi, Oyama, Lu Tse, Sun Tsu. the only modern novel of an Asian bent was Memoirs of a Geisha and I wish to fuck I hadn't bothered.

 

[McKitten]

1: I have no idea. I read about one book a week on average, but aside from Scalzi, Pratchett and Stross i can't currently think of any author i actually remember a picture of. GRRM i suppose though i haven't read anything by him in ages. So i might have read something from a black author but i'm not sure. I could definitly name a lot of authors whose names sound non-WASP that i've read.
2: I'm not from the US or UK and my first language isn't english so i pretty much ace this by default. Although i haven't actually read anything in my native language in months, i've recently read something from Adam Christopher (New Zealand), Hannu Rajaniemi (Finland), Marko Kloos (Germany), Wesley Chu (Taiwan), and that's probably just the last couple moths i remember.

 

[Risingblade]

Why is it always black? There are other minorities you know

 

[DrOswald]

1. More than six months ago but less than 2 years ago. I read dozens of books a year (just under 1 every 2 weeks, and up to 2 a day when I am on vacation, depending on the length of the book), and I remember noting in passing way that one of the books I was reading was written by a black person. I could not tell you when exactly this was nor the book title. Come to think of it, I can't name any novel I have read that I know was written by a black person, but by sheer statistical probability I have probably read several. None of the authors I follow are black. On the flip side, none of the authors I feel are talentless hacks are black either.

I do read books written by Neil Degrasse Tyson, but he isn't really an author in the way I normally think of it. His writings are a result of his greater work, not exactly an end to themselves. Plus, he doesn't write novels. At least not that I know of. I am working though his texts right now.

2. Only a few months ago I read a series of books translated from Japanese. I also read a book translated from German about a year ago, but it was a scientific text so that probably doesn't count.

 

[Grimh]

1# I barely pay attention to authors names let alone what they might look like...
I should change that.
I mean the only author whose books I purposefully read is Terry Pratchett and I guess Yahtzee.
Other than that I just pick up books based on recommendations.
So I guess I can't tell you the last book I read that was written by a black author.

Man, now I feel bad for just ignoring/forgetting about the authors of the books I enjoy.

2# Recently finished Metro 2033. I also recently reread Candide. Currently reading the Divine Comedy.

 

[L. Declis]

1) Throw this into "I don't keep track of the race of my authors" box, because I only know that GRR Martin and JK Rowling are white because I have seen them on television. Otherwise, I don't know what race my authors are.

2) I'm not reading a translated book; I'm reading the Three Kingdoms in the traditional Chinese. So, if I'm translating it in my head, does that count?

 

[K12]

All the authors I can think of who's race I actually know are all white.

Also, I'm not counting Alexandre Dumas because I think he was 3/4 white and I'm tempted to not include Barack Obama either because he is 1/2 white (does anyone else get annoyed that he is constantly referred to as being black when he's just as much as white man as a black man?)

 

[softclocks]

1) Dumas I guess, since he's african-caribbean. Not that I know a lot of black authors who do speculative fiction or continential philosophy.

2) Grotesque by Kirino Natsuo

 

[norashepard]

Does it have to be a novel by a black author? The most recent book I've read was From a Land Where Other People Live by Audre Lorde, but that's a collection of poetry and not a novel. If it can't be that, I've recently read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, every book Barack Obama has put out, Love by Toni Morrison, and a ton of stuff by Cornel West.

For the second thing: I read Latin American literature all the time because we have a lot of it in stores here in Texas. It's frequently really cheesy by American standards, but I like it.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

1. No clue, unless maybe Alexandre Dumas, of whom I've read The Count of Monte Cristo a few weeks back. But Dumas was only 1/4 black and identified as white, so maybe that doesn't count.

2. I've recently started reading The Last Wish by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. I'm only a few chapters in though.

 

[Ieyke]

1. Don't know, don't care. Half the time I con't even know if the author is a man or a woman because they just use initials for their first and middle name. TH White, KA Applegate, RA Salvatore, CS Goto, JK Rowling, JRR Tolkein, etc etc etc
And then names that aren't what you'd assume, like Tracy Hickman and Sandy Mitchell are guys.
And then gods know how many of them are pseudonyms.

Obviously I'm familiar with some of them, but others...*shrug*

2. Happens occasionally. Read enough classic stuff and it's inevitable. Homer, Sun Tzu, Musashi, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, the Brother Grimm, Anne Frank, Michael Ende, Nietzsche, Kafka, whoever wrote Beowulf, etc etc etc.

 

[FPLOON]

To those saying that the author's demographics don't matter, you're kinda missing the point. He's not saying you should judge a novel by those characteristics; he's just trying to identify whether people read books outside of their own demographics. Because if 100 people were to say 'demographics don't matter to me', they may well be right personally, but if none of them have ever read a books by an author outside their own demographic, there's clearly a factor at play: things like this influence our choices subconsciously.

Well, if that's the case... Then, I'm always reading outside my own demographic, given how I'm a black person! Most of the books I've read were made by some white writer in some way. shape, or form with the only exceptions being Japanese novelization that were translated and distributed by the same company that's publishing the manga version of the same story, basically... I mean, the only time I know that the author that wrote the book was black is when someone's trying to make some kind of big deal about the author's ethnic background... Oh my gosh! This very popular fiction book was written by an African-American! You don't see that everyday!!

It could also be that black people aren't published as often. All I know is that it indicates something when few of the people here feel certain they've ever read a black person's novel.

There is something of a ghetto that black fiction (that is, written by or about black people) falls into.

I've read lots of complaints about US bookstores in which black fiction is somehow a separate genre, segregated into its own section. Doesn't matter what the book is about, if it's by a black person or the main character is, it goes in the "Stuff that only black people read, which is all they read" section. For some reason.

I kinda forgot about situations like that happening in certain bookstores... I would be more bummed out about it[footnote]which I should be, given how I want to be a published writer myself...[/footnote] if I wasn't always just going straight to the manga section at any bookstore to check to see if any new and/or existing manga series would tickle my fancy this time...

 

[Weresquirrel]

1. No idea. As with a lot of folks in this topic, I rarely put a face to the name of the author. It's quite possible one of the books I've read was written by a non-white ethnicity, but I have no idea.

2. Don't think this counts, but I started reading Don Quixote a little while back. I actually bought two different translations, but neither was suitable for my needs. The first one was very well translated and very funny, but was set out terribly. Often there'd be several pages between breaks in paragraphs and it was a very hard read. The second copy I got was set out much better, but the translator didn't seem to do as good a job, and it didn't seem as well written or funny. So I finished neither. I want to try going back to my first copy again, as I said, it was very good. But a struggle to sift through.

 

[Whispering Cynic]

1. No idea, most likely never. The author's race is irrelevant. There are probably books where it is actually somehow relevant, but I'm not really interested in seeking them out.

2. Some sci-fi novels by Stanislaw Lem, but that's been a while ago (years, decades, I don't really keep track). Or the Divine Comedy... not sure which is the most recent one.