Category Archives: Diverse Stacks, Diverse Lives

Diverse Stacks, Diverse Lives Update: Preferences on Bookish Emails

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I am working on putting up a page that will contain links to books and authors that can serve as suggestions for anyone looking to diversify their reading stacks this year. I was just going through my BookBub emails from the weekend and I googled all of the authors of books that interested me and noticed that they were not all that diverse. So, I went to check what my preferences were set to. There are categories that are just LGBT and African-American interest. I just changed my settings today, so hopefully this will bring a little diversity to the subjects and authors in my daily emails.

It does, however, raise a really obvious question: If LGBT and African-American interest are separate categories, then who is served by all of the other categories (which are subject based and not demographic based)? This is why diverse reading challenges are important. Books with African-American characters aren’t only of interest to African-Americans and until readers start demanding diversity in the genres they read, this kind of categorizing won’t change.

(That being said, since African-American and LGBT voices aren’t well represented in broader categories, I think this kind of categorization is needed and important.)

Diverse Stacks, Diverse Lives Reading Challenge.

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Beth and I have done a lot of talking about the kinds of things that reading can do for a person. It really is a magical thing. It can transport you to different worlds. It can imagine new history. It can see potential futures. Studies have even shown that reading literary fiction can help you relate better to other people. So, with this in mind, we’ve put together our first reading challenge. Inspired by #weneedmorediversebooks, we’ve come up with a challenge to make us think about who we are reading and what we are reading about. Our challenge has three sub-challenges: one related to characters, one related to authors, and one related to books themselves. Each sub-challenge is only ten books long, so you can do any of the sub-challenges without changing how you read for the whole year. As a reader, you can tackle the whole challenge or one or more of the sub-challenges.

I will be maintaining a page here on this blog full of possible books to fulfill the challenge that I find in my reading travels. Of course, any suggestions will be helpfully added to the list. Part of what makes diversifying your reading difficult is that you don’t always know something is diverse going in. We are going to endeavor to make that easy by keeping a separate page of suggestions.

Since this challenge is only 30 books, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of diversity in literature and in life, but we hope that this list and the books that are read because of it will create interesting and thoughtful discussions. We hope that you will consider taking the challenge and reading along with us in 2016!