Is my reading diverse enough?

And other reflections from my year in books

I started using Goodreads in a systematic way a few years ago because I’ve reached the age where I can no longer remember whether I’ve read a book or not without technological assistance. Literally, I have bought a book, brought it home so excited to start, only to get ten pages in (or sometimes it takes more than ten pages) and realize that I’ve read this book before.¹

Tracking my reading also allows me to measure how diverse my reading is. My husband jokes that I never read books by white men and he’s not far off. As an English major in college and an avid (and somewhat snobbish) reader in my youth, I read A LOT of books by white men for the first thirty or so years of my life. I feel I could forgo white men for the next thirty years and probably still not make up the difference.

Because the books I read are an area of cultural consumption I have a high degree of control over, I try to make my reading as diverse as I can. Goodreads allows me to gage how well I did, so here are my stats for 2023, with one month yet to go.

I’ve read 200 books so far in 2023. That’s a pretty good year for me and indicative of the sad lack of good shows my husband and I found to stream, which is the main competition for reading time in our house. All of these were physical books, except a couple I read on our very old, very clunky Kindle when our library hold system slowed down so much, I became desperate.

As you can see, most of the books I read were by white people. Only 27% of the books I read were by Black, indigenous or people of color and that feels like a failure. If you add books written by LGBTQ+ folks (a category that’s harder to measure, unless authors self-disclose), 30% of the books I read were written by people in marginalized categories. But somewhere between 70%-73% of the books I read were by white, straight folks.

So, is my reading diverse enough?

How do my numbers compare to publishing itself? Of the books published in the U.S. between 1950 and 2018, 95 percent of them were written by white authors. Among the Big Five publishers who have disclosed their diversity numbers, Penguin Random House comes in at 75% of their authors, contributors and illustrators as white in 2021 with Hachette doing slightly better at 66% in 2021. So I’m doing better than PRH and worse than Hachette.

If my goal were for my reading to mirror the percent of racial groups in the United States as a whole, I’d be doing slightly better. White folks make up 76% of the U.S. population. That is not my goal, though. Which brings up the question, what is my goal?

As I’m writing this post, I keep asking myself, “Do I need to explain why it’s important to me to read diversely?” Does that go without saying? Are there white dudes out there who are going to take offense to the fact that I don’t read their books (probably, yes)?

I want to make my reading as diverse as possible to convince publishers that there is an audience out there for diverse books. Obviously, I can’t do that by myself. I’m a drop in the bucket. But I try to make as big a splash as possible in that bucket. Publishers are corporations. They are about making money. That’s their bottom line. If we want them to publish more BIPOC authors and queer authors and disabled authors and poor authors, we have to read those works when they’re published. We have to become that demand.

Also, I want reading to expand my world. My friend Kate and I joke that most of what we’ve learned about history and the world has come through novels. We joke, but is that such a bad thing? This year, I learned about Sri Lankan history in Brotherless Night. I learned about what happened to escaped slaves who stayed in Canada in In the Upper Country. I didn’t know anything about the history of indentured Indian servants being used on sugar plantations in Fiji, but I read A Disappearance in Fiji, and now I do. I love straight, cis white men, but, let’s be honest, I know a lot about their lives and their world already. I live in it every day.²

Given those goals, is 27%-30% of my reading enough? I’m not sure. I know I always start out strong at the beginning of the year in my goal to read diversely. I know that I have to be intentional to counteract a tendency to read books written by people who are ‘like me’, which is to say white. I know that a lot of the books that get pushed at me through book marketing are books by white people. Some of the best books I read this year by diverse authors didn’t appear on any lists. I stumbled onto them on the shelves of libraries and bookstores.³

Am I reading diversely enough? I don’t know. I think, at least for me, as a white person working as hard as I can in the best ways I know how at being anti-racist, I might always feel like I fall short. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. I don’t think smug certainty is really compatible with anti-racism. Or maybe that’s just me.

At any rate, for me, I’ll try again next year and see how it goes.

Here are some other random thoughts about reading and diversity:

- I don’t know if this goes without saying, but trying to read more diversely does not mean reading books I don’t like. Who would that help? No one. Also, I’m too old to spend time reading books I don’t like. Obviously, this eliminates some books by diverse authors because I just don’t like them, just like there are a lot of books by white authors I just don’t like. It doesn’t mean they’re bad books. They’re just not for me.

- On the other hand, I do try to acknowledge that there might be reasons related to race and other systems of oppression that push me toward certain books and away from others. I’m a sociologist and I believe race and gender and ableism and social class permeate all aspects of our lives, including what we think of as highly individual tastes in things like books or movies or music. But those tastes aren’t neutral. They’re shaped by the society we live in and that society is chocked full of systemic inequality. I do try to be aware of the way white supremacy shapes my tastes and preferences. For example, one of my favorite books I read this year was Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta. The style of this book, told first person by Carlotta, a Black trans woman recently released from prison, took some adjustment. There’s a lot of repetition and run-on sentences and sometimes Carlotta refers to herself in third person. Once I stuck with it, I loved it, but I had to push through that initial discomfort.

- I am a very eclectic reader. There’s really not a genre of fiction I don’t enjoy. And sometimes I am very much in the mood for a good mystery or a good horror or a good romance. I suspect that some of these genres are more difficult for diverse authors to penetrate. I’ve seen many more romance books by BIPOC and queer authors, which is mostly what I read in the romance category. In mystery and suspense, it’s still sometimes hard to find diverse authors. I’ve really only gotten into horror as a genre because of the amazing BIPOC authors in that genre (Tananarive Due and Attica Locke and Zakiya Dalia Harris and Silvia Moreno-Garcia). There’s great fantasy being written by diverse authors, but a lot less science fiction. I think this is part of how the racism in publishing surfaces, by pushing diverse authors into writing certain kinds of books and by only publishing certain types of books by diverse authors. For example, I think it’s much easier to publish literary fiction that centers experiences of oppression than it is to publish a fun, cozy mystery that happens to be written by a diverse author with diverse characters. It’s really time to let people write whatever kind of book they want and to acknowledge that lovers of all genres want to read diverse books.

- You can see on my pie chart that by far the largest category I read were books by Asian and Asian American authors. Again, it’s hard to measure how this reflects what’s being published, but the figures from Hachette suggest it’s their largest diverse category. Of their contributors of color, 6.8% were Asian, 6% Black, 5% Hispanic or Latinx, 2% Middle Eastern or North African and less than 1% Native American or Pacific Islander. I find this interesting, especially in light of one of my other favorite books of the year, Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang. It’s still not easy for Asian and Asian American authors to get published, but it also does seem that publishers believe their stories are somehow more digestible for the book-buying public.

- Finally and speaking of diversity in publishing, I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but Substack is not a particularly diverse place. The Atlantic wrote recently about Substack’s Nazi problem, but beyond that, it’s also just very white in my experience. Maybe there’s a #blacktwitter equivalent on Substack, but it’s not showing up on my home page. I looked up the top ten Substacks and only one of them wasn’t written by a white person/people. In the recommendations and top posts, I rarely see Substackers who aren’t white. I think this whiteness contributes to the sort of bootstrap mentality I see showing up here. This idea that hard work conquers all. I’ve written before about the lie of meritocracy in publishing, so I won’t go on about it again, but Substack is, of course a publishing platform and so, also, not a meritocracy. I’m thinking about how to read more diversely on Substack, so welcome to any suggestions folks have.

1. I know Goodreads is problematic, as it’s owned by Amazon. I have tried going analog and keeping a book journal, but I didn’t keep up with it and it lacked the convenience of having an app on my phone, so when I’m standing in a book store with a book in my hand, I can easily check whether I have, in fact, read this book.

2. I did read a lot of the Slow Horses books by Mick Herron this year, because they’re fun and we were watching the TV series. Do I know more about the life of spies now? Probably not. But I do know what goes on inside the mind of Roddy Ho, and that’s pretty hilarious.

3. Special shout-out here to Tomorrow Bookstore in Indianapolis, Indiana, where it is always very easy to find books by diverse authors that I really, really want to read. Dangerous for my pocketbook, but they do an excellent job curating books by BIPOC authors across a range of genres in a very small space. I haven’t been to the new Loudmouth Books in Indy, but it would also be a great place to find books by diverse authors, given that it was started by author Leah Johnson in response to the movement to ban so many books that fit in those categories.