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The sun finally made its appearance here in the Boston area. After days of muggy, unsettled weather, there was finally enough of a break in the clouds for me to sit out on my back deck and read for a little bit.
I’ve mostly been “reading” audio books since that seems to be the only way that I can actually get some reading time in. While I enjoy it, I do find that it is harder for me to remember things that happen after I’ve listened to them, and I continue to miss the easy way I have of highlighting or underlining specific passages that stand out to me in an analog book. I also miss the physical feel of holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.
During my recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, I wrote about visiting the Thomas Wolfe memorial, and while there, I bought his book, Look Homeward Angel. A real physical book for me to read! I’m only 47 pages into the book, which is a hefty 508 pages long, and I’ve already encountered multiple awful racist descriptions. I will most likely continue to read the book. Wolfe has this engaging way of painting the personalities of his main characters as well as creating an in-depth portrait of the town he grew up in (though he changed the characters’ and the town’s names, it is clearly autobiographical).
Given his ability to go deep into his characters’ souls, I wish that he had done the same for the black characters we encounter. It feels like he has painted this masterpiece and left glaring blank spots on his canvas. Or rather, spots that are fuzzy and clumsily painted, quite distracting and so obviously not done with the same skill as the other parts of the painting.
I am of the mind that these old classics should not be banned or censored. I do, however, believe that we should read them with a critical eye. We should not wave our hands and say, oh, he was only a product of his time, and we should ignore the racist elements of the book. Why? Why would we do that, given our current critical knowledge and awareness, why wouldn’t we also apply the learnings we have gained over all these years to these older works?
So, yes, I will finish this book and I will continue to read other “classics,” but I will also make an effort to read more classics by people of color. Doing a simple Google search, I stumbled across this site outlining 100 must-read classics by people of color. I’m not educated enough to know if it’s a good list or not, but there’s no time like the present for me to get started. I have only read two(!) of the books on this list (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison), so I’m excited to get started.
Although my list is woefully short, here is another list of other great contemporary fiction books by people of color that I think would be great books to add to your list if you’re looking to increase the range of your “classics” to-be-read list. They may not be considered classics, but who the heck is the arbiter of that anyway? Are they books that stick with you? Do you go back and reread them time and again? Do you share them with your friends and family? In my book, that makes them classics. Here they are for me:
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemison
The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Down the Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos
What are some of your favorite classic works by people of color? Share them in the comments below.
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