Mental Health Bookclub discussion

Listopia:
Best Fiction and Memoirs by Authors of Color
#ReadPOC: List of Books by Authors of Color

Some examples
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Alice Walker
Chinua Achebe
Nicola Yoon
Sandra Cisneros
Toni Morrison
Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
Haruki Murakami
Maya Angelou
Sherman Alexie
Kazuo Ishiguro
Zadie Smith
Roopa Farooki
Malala Yousafzai

Discussion prompts
- What will you / did you read for this prompt? What did you think?
- Have you read many works by authors of color before?
- Frustratingly, institutional racism still exists in publishing, as in many other areas (e.g. film, politics etc.). Have you experienced work by authors of colour being freely available and widely publicised, as much as that of white authors? If not, how can we change it?
- Often, this issue is exacerbated by a lack of awareness. Until I came across the BustleReads Challenge when I actually looked on my bookshelf and realised how biased my reading is to white authors. It was only then that I bought and read Americanah, which turned out to be fantastic! Do you think you would have read this book had this task not asked you to? No judgement!

This is one I've actually done myself! :D

For this task I read All About Love by bell hooks. I quite liked it, though it was a struggle in places. It touches on some of these issues (namely, racism and inequality), placing a lack of love at the heart of the problems in society. See review here

I haven't read many before, as I said in the post above, it was only when I took on the BustleReads Challenge that it really drew my attention to it. Attention/awareness was the issue - as I'm often in the habit of going into Waterstones and picking up a couple of books I like the covers/blurb of, if there weren't a lot of authors of colour on there, I wouldn't be picking them up, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I hope to be better now that I think about it more.

I don't think authors or colour are publicised or recognised to anywhere near the same extent as white authors, and it seems bizarre to be missing out on the perspective of so many people! I hope that as more people become aware of it, they can use their power as consumers to demand more from the publishing world and get more works out there by authors who aren't straight/white/male/cisgendered etc.