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

[dyre]

Dream of a red mansion and journey to the west, maybe the translation was just really bad but I couldn't get through the first page.

It's an understandable criticism; I'm Chinese-American and I didn't like Journey to the West (haven't read enough of Dream of the Red Chamber) much either. I like to compare to Homer's Odyssey; ancient epics, while of historical value, simply aren't worth much in terms of entertainment value. The art of writing apparently wasn't very well-developed back then (especially in terms of character development, nonexistent in both the Greek and Chinese epics). The translations, in my experience, mostly attempt to stay faithful to the style of the original texts, rather than accommodate modern audiences (although from what I've seen of Red Chamber it's a little more palatable).

 

[Hieronymusgoa]

Foreign stuff "G w t Dragon Tattoo" springs to my mind as well. As does the "Nochnoi Dozor/Night Watch"...well "Wächter der Nacht" ^^ I did read all of them, too (so, Russian in the original).

Normally I read stuff which is of some English origin though I'm German and I read a lot of German literature therefore, too.

Black writers....like many of the other commenters, I mostly don't know if a writer is black. If it's a German writer the chances are crazy small that he is black...I do read a lot of American writers but I guess the ones I've read are all white but like I said, no idea...I've read Egyptian authors though, Chinese...

EDIT: Phew....Dumas was black? Then I DID read something of a black guy. Did I dodge some kind of bullet then?

 

[Stg]

I reread Count of Monte Cristo recently and I've read both the original Three Kingdoms as well as the translated versions. Also, I don't understand this whole need to know a book by a black author. The simple fact the TC has thrown that into the ring points to the fact he or she is a bit of a racist if they focus on the author's skin color and not the books they wrote.

Then again, the same could be said for films as well. Name one white film maker and many people would elude to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings because they are big names and pretty famous. Name one black film maker and people might be stumped (as would I) because I really don't care that much about who makes the movies I enjoy. There are a handful of film makers I follow (Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino for instance), but past that I don't really care about the people behind the movies just as much as I don't care about the person behind the pen. Sounds a little harsh, but that's probably going to be the general consensus if you go around and ask random people to start naming authors by skin color.

 

[Eamar]

Dream of a red mansion and journey to the west, maybe the translation was just really bad but I couldn't get through the first page.

It's an understandable criticism; I'm Chinese-American and I didn't like Journey to the West (haven't read enough of Dream of the Red Chamber) much either. I like to compare to Homer's Odyssey; ancient epics, while of historical value, simply aren't worth much in terms of entertainment value. The art of writing apparently wasn't very well-developed back then (especially in terms of character development, nonexistent in both the Greek and Chinese epics). The translations, in my experience, mostly attempt to stay faithful to the style of the original texts, rather than accommodate modern audiences (although from what I've seen of Red Chamber it's a little more palatable).

I have no idea if it's also true for ancient Chinese works, but for the Greek stuff it's actually completely anachronistic to think of them as "texts" or to imagine that they were designed to be read. They were part of an oral tradition, meaning that they were meant to be performed by bard-like people and passed on orally, which obviously alters the storytelling requirements somewhat (it was probably episodic, and the focus has to be on keeping the audience engaged moment to moment rather than creating elaborately fleshed out characters).

It's also pretty likely that there was no "original text" or even a "Homer" who completely composed the poems from scratch. What we have is in all likelihood just one version of many that happened to be written down at some point and survive. Same goes for stuff like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, though not for the Roman Aeneid, which actually was composed and written down by Virgil.

Not particularly relevant to this thread, but since I've spent several terms studying this stuff I thought I'd contribute something potentially interesting

 

[Kyber]

Well, I like to think I've read every book from Nietzsche, and a lot of books by Freud, I've also read Confucious and Machiavelli.

 

[dyre]

Dream of a red mansion and journey to the west, maybe the translation was just really bad but I couldn't get through the first page.

It's an understandable criticism; I'm Chinese-American and I didn't like Journey to the West (haven't read enough of Dream of the Red Chamber) much either. I like to compare to Homer's Odyssey; ancient epics, while of historical value, simply aren't worth much in terms of entertainment value. The art of writing apparently wasn't very well-developed back then (especially in terms of character development, nonexistent in both the Greek and Chinese epics). The translations, in my experience, mostly attempt to stay faithful to the style of the original texts, rather than accommodate modern audiences (although from what I've seen of Red Chamber it's a little more palatable).

I have no idea if it's also true for ancient Chinese works, but for the Greek stuff it's actually completely anachronistic to think of them as "texts" or to imagine that they were designed to be read. They were part of an oral tradition, meaning that they were meant to be performed by bard-like people and passed on orally, which obviously alters the storytelling requirements somewhat (it was probably episodic, and the focus has to be on keeping the audience engaged moment to moment rather than creating elaborately fleshed out characters).

It's also pretty likely that there was no "original text" or even a "Homer" who completely composed the poems from scratch. What we have is in all likelihood just one version of many that happened to be written down at some point and survive. Same goes for stuff like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, though not for the Roman Aeneid, which actually was composed and written down by Virgil.

Not particularly relevant to this thread, but since I've spent several terms studying this stuff I thought I'd contribute something potentially interesting

Yeah, fair point. I realize they were originally just oral tradition, which is necessarily episodic in nature when telling an epic, but I have to say, even if I tried to read the Odyssey piecemeal and imagined it being narrated by Morgan Freeman, I still probably couldn't enjoy it! I suppose it may be unfair to apply the standards of the written novel to a recorded oral epic, but, well, what can I say...I guess "oral tradition as a medium of storytelling sacrifices many elements found in conventional written works and the Odyssey suffers as a result of it" would be more accurate?

I don't excuse Dickens's terrible writing just because he was paid by the page and split up his stories to publish in a monthly journal, so I won't excuse Odyssey just because it is a collection of various stories told by random guys sitting around a fireplace!

 

[Flammablezeus]

EDIT: Lots of people ask me why I'm curious about question #1. Well, many answered it with "I don't know if or when I read something by a black writer, because race doesn't matter to me and I never check what the writers look like." Well, let's be honest here, people -- if I'd asked for a white writer, every single person would have been able to name at least one writer they knew was white that they'd read. Even though they "don't care about race and never bother to look up what a writer's face looks like." And that says something about our society, though I'm not sure what yet.

I think it says that there is a much greater amount of white people than black people in our respective societies.

On topic, I don't know if I've read anything by a black author. If I have, I've either forgotten or never realised in the first place.

The only translated works I've read that I can think of are Let the Old Dreams Die by John Ajvide Lindqvist and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Granted, they're both popular authors but it's all I could think of. I'd mention The Bible but I never read the whole thing.

 

[Lynx]

1. By an African-American author, no, I don't think I have. I don't know why, and I've never thought about it until now.

2. I suppose that would be The Trial (Der Process) by Franz Kafka. On my to-read shelf, I also have Anna Karenina by Tolstoy as well as Crime and Punishment by Dostojevskij, and I plan to read them both as soon as I'm done with Game of Thrones.

 

[Queen Michael]

Dream of a red mansion and journey to the west, maybe the translation was just really bad but I couldn't get through the first page.

I'm reading Dream of etc. right now, and I read Journey to the West years ago. Love both of them.

The translations, in my experience, mostly attempt to stay faithful to the style of the original texts, rather than accommodate modern audiences (although from what I've seen of Red Chamber it's a little more palatable).

Maybe that's why I love them; the Swedish translations are more about accomodating modern-day audiences.

 

[Blow_Pop]

I do have to agree. Prose is just as valid as a novel.

Well, prose is how novels are usually written, so that's kind of a false dichotomy.

Not when your country(or maybe it's just my state) teaches that prose is strictly poetry

That would be a state of confusion, then, mate. =)

According to the Merriam-Webster, prose is "a literary medium distinguished from poetry especially by its greater irregularity and variety of rhythm and its closer correspondence to the patterns of everyday speech."

And their short definition is simply "writing that is not poetry." So yeah, quod erat demonstrandum and all that jazz.

Never claimed my country was smart. And I have no interest in what we call English class that goes over stuff like that(still not sure why it's called English and not "how to write essays and analyze stories/poems" besides the fact that's a long title for a class name but that's the gist of what it is).

So why the focus on just black authors and not authors of any other ethnicity/race than white? And why not female authors who write things other than romance/paranormal romance? And why just novels and not just published literary works by (insert description of author here)?

 

[gagagaga]

I'm not sure I've read anything by a black author, but I don't look up what authors look like, generally.

The most recent translated novel I've read was Blindness by José Saramago (Portugese), I believe.

 

[Luminous Chroma]

EDIT: Lots of people ask me why I'm curious about question #1. Well, many answered it with "I don't know if or when I read something by a black writer, because race doesn't matter to me and I never check what the writers look like." Well, let's be honest here, people -- if I'd asked for a white writer, every single person would have been able to name at least one writer they knew was white that they'd read. Even though they "don't care about race and never bother to look up what a writer's face looks like." And that says something about our society, though I'm not sure what yet.

I think it says exactly what the replies indicate: that to most readers, race genuinely isn't an issue. If someone has written a good book, the reader tends not to care what the author looks like. Some authors are highly publicized (Stephen King springs to mind), and readers are familiar with their their appearance, but that's not a racial issue.

In response to your original questions:

1: I read a few books in college that could be considered about 'being black'. They were fine, and I'm not sorry I read them, but they aren't among my favorites. The stories just weren't engaging enough. It had nothing to do with the races of the characters. I frankly don't give a hoot if someone is black, white, yellow, or brown. I'd be curious if they were green, but if a green person wrote a lousy book, I wouldn't feel obligated to like it just because they were green.

2: I read Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' trilogy, as well as a half-dozen of the 'Vampire Hunter D' books. Living in America, it can actually be kind of hard to guess (without research) whether an author is from another country. America has so many cultures and races mixed together that anyone might be from Europe, Asia, or some sleepy little neighborhood in Idaho. Again, it seems to come back to the question of whether the book is good. If so, why does it matter where the author hails from? Doesn't an author's interest lie in having people read their books? Why is it necessary for a reader to find out what they look like? If we judge authors on appearance rather than quality of work, aren't we undermining their work before we can fairly evaluate it?

 

[Zen Bard]

2 - Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (To be fair, not a novel and I didn't complete it as it was an exceptionally difficult read for me, though still interesting.)

I read that! What a great collection of bizarrely unique short stories.

On topic:

Number One: "Patternmaster" by Octavia Butler (black AND a woman!...Boo-yah!)

Number Two: The first two "Witcher" books by Andrzej Sapkowski; the first three "Nightwatch" books by Sergei Lukyanenko

By the way, I'm seeing a lot of posts where people say they don't research authors they like.

I guess I'm curious as to why not? Why would you NOT want to know more about an author whose books you appreciate? Wouldn't you want to know more about a musician or actor whose performance just blew you away. Aren't you interested in what drives them or colors their work?

Again, I'm just curious...not being critical.

Oddly enough, my captcha is "The Bible", which depending on one's point of view, could fall into either category.

 

[Cerebrawl]

1. I have no idea. I've read well over a thousand SF and Fantasy books so I suspect I have. The only one I know is black I haven't read the books, only seen the movie adaptations(Alexander Dumas).

2. Yes, several. From Russian, probably more too, again see: read over a thousand books in SF and Fantasy. (For russian I've read Metro 2033 and A Roadside Picnic).

 

[Tigerlily Warrior]

Translated work may be less common among English or American audiences but if you were to ask that question for other mediums like ART, I regularly view and support artists from all over the world that are women and minorities.

DeviantArt is a great site to visit. Though, you can view written work (which I do, mostly German and Japanese) as well.

 

[Trunkage]

Q2 - The Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko

An abridged version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Never been able to find a full not in Chinese

 

[Da Orky Man]

A black writer? Why not an Indian writer, an Arab writer, or a specifically Nigerian writer? For specifically a black writer, no idea. I read many books, including a fair few self-published ones on Kindle of which I know nearly nothing about the author.

As for a translated book... probably a bit of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, originally written in Latin/Greek.

 

[Vivi22]

1) /shrug. I pick the books I want to read based off genre, not the race of the author.

2) Are we counting manhwa? Because, I've been reading Ability, Girls of the Wilds, ID, Witch Hunter, XO Sisters, etc.

1. Doesn't really answer my question about when the last time you read a black writer was.

I would assume the answer implicit in this statement is that they don't know. I would wager most people don't know to be perfectly honest.

 

[MXRom]

I guess the last one that fills the 2nd criteria would be "Romance of Three Kingdoms". I think there was some translation trouble as the poetry has no rhyming, rhythm, or even a noticeable pattern.

Can't remember the title of the one that fills (1). I think it was a biographical fiction or something.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

I read mostly online.

People don't have a habit of posting their faces with their random fan fiction or stories.

I know the faces of 3 authors the books of whom I've actually read. I really don't give a damn.

The vast majority of online stories were already written in English.

The last translated book was The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which I read in Finnish, translated from Swedish.

I read less then 4 real books per year. I honestly don't have the slightest which was written by a black man, but 2 were not.