Library Days

[osprey_archer]

The library has an outreach program to one of the local daycare centers, and yesterday I got to pick out the chapter books to send for the fourth through sixth graders.

Mostly this consisted of me careening around the children's section with my inner eleven year old unleashed. "Oh look! It's Matilda! And The Egypt Game, I absolutely have to pack The Egypt Game. And The Headless Cupid too. And the Time Warp Trio series! (Surely I wasn't the only one who read those? They were awesome.) And So You Want to Be a Wizard! Which is probably a little too old for them! But maybe there's a super smart twelve-year-old who will love it!"

By which point my cart was half full of books, and I stopped to take a breather and consider my selections and went, "My God, I've got a cart full of white people books."

Of course I went back to get more books by authors of color, but it was still disheartening. My selection criteria had been "Did I love this book as a child? Yes? Then IN IT GOES"; and when I was a kid I did read a lot of books by authors of color, so it wasn't that I didn't know about them. But apparently the only ones that stuck were Lensey Namioka's engagingly shallow samurai books and Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, which was in the wrong age range anyway.

And it's exasperating, because I can read whatever I think I ought to, but I can't love something just because I think I should. There's this feeling - that I can try to be what I think is a better person, who reads books by everyone and anyone; but deep down, I am only ever going to be this parochial little girl who loves books by people just like her.

Comments

[anait.livejournal.com]

I have missed so many interesting posts that you made, I am having to pick and choose. Talk about things which don't appeal to me, please, and then I won't have to feel bad about not commenting! ;)

Most of the books I read as a child were written by white authors, even the books about POC. I feel cheated, in retrospect, by my libraries and upbringing. This means that, like you, my childhood favourites do not include books by authors of colour.

The answer, I guess, is to read more books, and find new favourites to love along with the old ones. They are out there, waiting to be found.

This 50books_POC challenge is really great. It's giving me a new interest in reading literary fiction, which has never really been my thing. I've read some really good books already.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

What? All my most desperate attempts to be boring have failed? WOE.

My libraries did have books by POC, but they were almost entirely books about suffering and anguish (which I liked then even less than I do now, and read out of an obscure sense of duty). I don't know if this was a result of publishers' biases ("Obviously the only thing people of color can write better than white people is MISERY!") or the library's, but either way it was a wretched state of affairs.

I did finally stumble on a book I quite liked; I wrote about it in my new review.

[anait.livejournal.com]

Maybe you will make a boring post again soon? Since no one can be consistently %100 interesting, surely this means one is bound to turn up eventually.

I am frowning at the biases of publishers and libraries. >: | <--- Frowny face