10 Books Celebrating Diversity: A Guest Post

or, Ten Books Not Written by Straight White Males

A couple days ago, the Top Ten Tuesday theme was "Books Celebrating Diversity." This is something I feel very strongly about, because publishers need to be publishing work by more diverse people than they do. But something I feel more strongly about is listening to people who are different from me. I didn't want to be another straight white girl throwing out a list about diversity. So I asked a friend whose thoughts, poetry, and taste I admire greatly to share this space with me today. Enjoy Vanessa Borjon Fernandez's list, fill up your TBR, and check out her writing here!

Vanessa Borjon Fernandez

I was recently asked by Julianne to write up a list of ten books that celebrate diversity. I was glad to be asked this favor and immediately thought of some titles I could include, and it turned out to be kind of difficult to limit the list to top ten, but alas, here are ten books not written by Straight White Males™ that are immaculate and should be read urgently if you love literature. (In no particular order, besides #1 because holy hell it is the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read in my whole life. Please go read it right away.)

10. // M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang - There’s so much I could say about this play. Smart and terse and subversive, this play inspired by the opera Madama Butterfly, tells the story of a French general who falls in love with an opera singer whom he believes is a woman but is actually a male. M. Butterfly challenges Western Orientalism’s racism and sexism.

9. // Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros - Reading this book feels like you’re sitting outside on a sunny day and you’re sweating and then the palatero walks by ringing his bell and you get a fresa paleta and then fall in love with someone with big brown eyes and you kiss and the kiss kind of tastes like fresa but then your new amor de amores has to leave for a long time and you go back to sitting outside in the sweltering heat. Don’t know what that feels like? Read this book to find out, or fall in love and eat some ice cream.

8. // Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - In this book about black love and black womanhood (and a myriad of other things), Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of my favorite character in all of fiction: Janie Crawford. Beautiful and heart wrenching and complicated, this book is so good.

7. // Drown by Junot Diaz - A book of short stories by the famed Junot Diaz (who is as charming in real life as his writing is impeccable). Hilarious, complicated and hopeful—often times these stories are all three at once.

6. // Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler - Read this right now if you love science fiction.

5. // Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson - Read this right now if you’ve already read Lilith’s Brood. Read this right now if you haven’t.

4. // Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster - Holy shit. Reading this book felt like unlearning everything I knew about respectable whiteness in literature, like a dog walked over and took a dump on Walt Whitman and what was left was this ruthless book of fictionalized mythology where the Aztecs have overthrown Europe. Glorious.

3. // The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil - I was left speechless by this collection of prose poems, and I think this is a common occurrence for people who read this book. Let me think of words that come to mind when I recall Bhanu’s poems: pristine, beautiful, traumatic, fragile, glory. Read this book slowly. Live in each word for a while.

2. // Sula by Toni Morrison - I have so much to say about Sula but I will just say this to stay brief: This book taught me the power of female friendships. This book was written by the greatest American writer of all time.

1. // …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomas Rivera - An amalgamation of short stories and vignettes, Tomas Rivera writes about the lives of migrant workers through the eyes of an unnamed young boy who witnesses the injustices of growing up immigrant and Mexican and poor. Folkloric and haunting and lovely. The last five pages are so beautiful I am left speechless every time I read this book.

Review: Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee by Megan Boyle

Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee by Megan Doyle
Publisher: MuuMuu House. November 2011
Pages: 96
Genre: Poetry
Source: Library
First Line: "I could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write 'sports sports sports sports sports' for three pages"


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I don't really want to say that I'm obsessed with this book, but I think I'm obsessed with this book. First of all, I don't know shit about poetry, but this didn't feel like poetry. The book is like a diary. Some of the entries are just random, stream of consciousness statements. Some of the entries are more focused like "everyone i've had sex with" (published on thought catalog first, if you want a taste).

All of her statements are (mostly) funny, confessional, true, insightful, and surprising. It's like a collection of unrelated things that sum up to what it's like to be a 20-something. Some of the "posts" are really thoughtful, and some are more boring, unimportant details and thoughts of her life. But they're all thrilling to hear, because it's like looking into the deepest recesses of someone's mind. Honestly almost every page was bookmarked because I liked something on it. What I like about Megan Boyle's writing is how open she is. Not just in that she will say things that people may not normally share (or know how to put into words), but that it's all simply stated and clear. Her voice is mesmerizing and hard not to love entirely. It's very relatable, but that also makes some parts of the experience reading this difficult. Though she is funny and genuine, some of the things she says are troubling. Like many 20-somethings, she is disaffected and lost to an extent. Overly curious, self-aware, and depressed. It's hard to see her like that and see her talk about it so bluntly, because it's hard to see some of those things in myself. But I'm glad she was the one who made me look. And she made me feel hopeful.

I read this in July and it took me a while to review it, because I wasn't really sure how to do it justice. While reading it, I kept forcing people to read pages of it that I liked. After reading it, I kept trying to force it on other people. This is me virtually trying to force it on to you, because I think it's worth the time. Check out the quotes below and be charmed.


Some Quotes:

"Will smith is in 'men in black.' He is also in 'independence day.' People like to see will smith reacting to aliens. Will smith is a visual manifestation of the suspension of disbelief it takes to imagine realistically interacting with aliens. "

"Eventually I think I made enough funny/relevant comments that I 'broke even,' or maybe exceeded and moved into 'well-liked'"

"sometimes being with people is fun but other times it feels like I'm operating myself from a distance, telling myself I'm having a good time'

"I think some moments exist to be simple sentences that don't necessarily have a greater purpose than to be exactly what they are"

"i have frequently thought ‘i am trying to be okay’ in the past 48 hours without really knowing what ‘okay’ is or what i need to do to be‘trying’"



Outlandishness Rating: 8/10 

The disjointed, ambiguous format, the stream of consciousness thoughts, as well as the lack of concern for capitalization make this a pretty interesting read.