Monthly Archives: January 2019

Inclusive Reading Recommendations — Literary Fiction

For this post, we’re focusing on inclusive reading recommendations in literary fiction. Granted, what constitutes literary fiction is up for some debate, so it can sort of end up being a catch-all term. For this post, I’m defining literary fiction as fictional stories that center the character journey rather than centering plot or genre tropes.

  1. Swing Time by Zadie Smith
    • “”An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers–but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free.”
  2. Islay by Douglas Bullard
    • “Islay is the name of an imaginary island state coveted by Lyson Sulla, a Deaf man who is tired of feeling that ‘hearing think deaf means dumb, pat head.’ Sulla signs this to his wife Mary in explanation of his desire to tum Islay into a state solely for Deaf people, with himself as governor. From there, his peripatetic quest begins.”
  3. Sing, unburied, sing by Jesmyn Ward
    • “Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family.”
  4. Nevada by Imogen Binnie
    • “Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she’d carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly change her forever.”
  5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
    • “When his ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them “the truth.” After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional-but is it more true?”
  6. The leavers by Lisa Ko
    • “One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.”
  7. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
    • “Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith’s own life, The Price of Salt tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany–the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese’s job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society’s confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation.”
  8. Exit west by Mohsin Hamid
    • “In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet–sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors–doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.”
  9. The mothers by Brit Bennett
    • “It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken beauty. Mourning her mother’s recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. It’s not serious– until the pregnancy. As years move by, Nadia, Luke, and her friend Aubrey are living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently?”
  10. The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif
    • “Miriam is the traditional young Indian mother, hardworking and self-effacing. But then she meets the rebellious Amina who confounds the Indian community by driving a taxi and setting up a cafe with a black man, and her world is turned upside down.”
  11. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    • “The lives of two sisters–Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates–are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.”
  12. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
    • “A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the ‘bomb of Bombay’ chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947–and examines a whole people’s capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.”
  13. Fierce femmes and notorious liars : a dangerous trans girl’s confabulous memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
    • “Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is a coming-of-age story about a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who make their home in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles.”
  14. The book of unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
    • “Moving from Mexico to America when their daughter suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras confront cultural barriers, their daughter’s difficult recovery and her developing relationship with a Panamanian boy.”
  15. Good kings bad kings by Susan Nussbaum.
    • “The residents at a facility for disabled young people in Chicago build trust and make friends in an effort to fight against their living conditions and mistreatment.”
  16. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
    • “Things Fall Apart tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a ‘strong man’ of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society. The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo’s world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries.”
  17. Everything I never told you by Celeste Ng
    • “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party. When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.”
  18. And the mountains echoed by Khaled Hosseini
    • “Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named, is everything; there is an unparalleled bond between these two motherless siblings. What happens to them, and the large and small manners in which it echos through the lives of so many other people is example of the moral complexity of life. In this multigenerational novel revolving around parents and children, brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, the author explores the many ways in which family members love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another.”
  19. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
    • “The tale of two women: the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, back in the thirties. Their southern-style cafe offered good barbecue, good coffee, and all kinds of love and laughter–not to mention an occasional murder.”
  20. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
    • “Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history.”

As always, feel free to include your own recommendations in the comments below!

Inclusive Reading Recommendations — Mystery

Happy New Year everyone! Was reading more inclusively on anyone else’s list of resolutions? Here’s another inclusive reading recommendations list to help you out. This one is focused on mysteries, detective stories, crime novels and the like.

  1. Devil in a blue dress by Walter Mosley
    • “Devil in a Blue Dress honors the tradition of the classic American detective novel by bestowing on it a vivid social canvas and the freshest new voice in crime writing in years, mixing the hard-boiled poetry of Raymond Chandler with the racial realism of Richard Wright to explosive effect.”
  2. Death of a red heroine by Qiu Xiaolong
    • “Inspector Chen Cao, head of the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, investigates the murder of a National Model Worker whose private life may have led to her death.”
  3. Four hands by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
    • “Greg Simon and Julio Fernandez are investigative jounalists who are chasing down an elaborate conspiracy plot. The story they discover and type out together weaves truth with lies, wild humor with tragedy, and reality with fantasy–a stranger-than-fiction tale of imperial excess where delusion makes perfect sense.”
  4. The paying guests by Sarah Waters
    • “It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa – a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants – life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.”
  5. Bluebird, bluebird by Attica Locke
    • “When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules–a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders–a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman–have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes–and save himself in the process–before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.”
  6. Trail of lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
    • “While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive.”
  7. The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco
    • “It is 1887, and Alma Rosales is on the hunt for stolen opium. Trained in espionage by the Pinkerton Detective Agency–but dismissed for bad behavior and a penchant for going undercover as a man–Alma now works for Delphine Beaumond, the seductive mastermind of a West Coast smuggling ring. When product goes missing at their Washington Territory outpost, Alma is tasked with tracking the thief and recovering the drugs. In disguise as the scrappy dockworker Jack Camp, this should be easy–once she muscles her way into the local organization, wins the trust of the magnetic local boss and his boys, discovers the turncoat, and keeps them all from uncovering her secrets. All this, while sending coded dispatches to the circling Pinkerton agents to keep them from closing in.”
  8. The death of friends by Michael Nava
    • “When Supreme Court judge Chris Chandler is found dead in his chambers, his old friend, Henry Rios, a gay Mexican American criminal defense lawyer, investigates and finds that the man had a secret life.”
  9. Real world by Natsuo Kirino
    • “In a crowded residential suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer and endless cram school sessions meant to ensure entry into good colleges…. When Toshi’s next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor’s son, a high school boy they nickname Worm. But when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers–dangers they never could have even imagined–that rises from within them as well as from the world around them.”
  10. Wife of the gods by Kwei Quartey
    • “An original debut novel set in Ghana, is the story of Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, who is sent from the big city to the village of Ketanu to solve the murder of an accomplished young AIDS worker. Darko’s own mother disappeared from this same village many years ago, and as the mystery unfolds, the reader meets a rich cast of characters, and learns about Trokosi, a system where young teenage girls are sent to live with fetish priests to bring good fortune to their families. Darko explores the motivations and secrets of the residents of Ketanu, and in addition to solving a recent murder, discovers the shocking truth about his own mother’s disappearance.”
  11. A crack in the wall by Claudia Piñeiro
    • “Pablo Simó’s life is a mess. His career as an architect is at a dead-end; he is reduced to designing soulless office buildings desecrating the heart of Buenos Aires. His marriage seems to be one endless argument with his wife over the theatrics of their rebellious teenage daughter. To complicate matters, Pablo has long been attracted to sexy office secretary Marta Horvat, who is probably having an affair with his boss. Everything changes with the unexpected appearance of Leonor, a beautiful young woman who brings to light a crime that happened years before, a crime that everyone in the office wants forgotten, at all costs.”
  12. Wish you were here by Rita Mae Brown
    • “Crozet, Virginia, is a typical small town-until its secrets explode into murder. Crozet’s thirty-something post-mistress, Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen, has a tiger cat (Mrs. Murphy) and a Welsh Corgi (Tucker), a pending divorce, and a bad habit of reading postcards not addressed to her. When Crozet’s citizens start turning up murdered, Harry remembers that each received a card with a tombstone on the front and the message “Wish you were here” on the back. Intent on protecting their human friend, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker begin to scent out clues. Meanwhile, Harry is conducting her own investigation, unaware her pets are one step ahead of her. If only Mrs. Murphy could alert her somehow, Harry could uncover the culprit before the murder occurs–and before Harry finds herself on the killer’s mailing list. “
  13. A rising man by Abir Mukherjee
    • “Calcutta, 1919. Captain Sam Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. The body of a senior official has been found in a filthy sewer, and a note left in his mouth warns the British to quit India, or else. Wyndham is teamed with arrogant Inspector Digby and Sergeant Banerjee, one of the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID. The case takes them from the opulent mansions of wealthy British traders to the seedy opium dens of the city– and puts them under pressure to solve the case before it erupts into increased violence on the streets.”
  14. IQ by Joe Ide
    • “The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood’s high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can’t or won’t touch. They call him IQ. He’s a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford, which might be a set of tires or a homemade casserole. To get by, he’s forced to take on clients that can pay. This time, it’s a rap mogul whose life is in danger. As Isaiah investigates, he encounters a vengeful ex-wife, a crew of notorious cutthroats, a monstrous attack dog, and a hit man who even other hit men say is a lunatic. The deeper Isaiah digs, the more far reaching and dangerous the case becomes.”
  15. A carrion death by Michael Stanley
    • “In the aftermath of the murder of an anonymous victim, assistant superintendent David Bengu begins his career on Botswana, where his convivial passions and determined methods earn him a local nickname that likens him to a hippopotamus.”
  16. There, there by Tommy Orange
    • “Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle’s memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather. Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions — intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path.”
  17. Blanche on the lam by Barbara Neely
    • “In the first of the Blanche White mystery series, the witty and determined Blanche finds herself unexpectedly embroiled in a case of hidden family secrets, untold riches and suspicious deaths.”
  18. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
    • “In a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmith introduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, Ripley is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young American back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself very fond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him, exactly like him. Suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral, Ripley stops at nothingcertainly not only one murderto accomplish his goal. Turning the mystery form inside out, Highsmith shows the terrifying abilities afforded to a man unhindered by the concept of evil.”
  19. The cosmic clues by Manjiri Prabhu
    • “When a cat leads Sonia to her very first investigation, she quickly unmasks a killer, using astrology as her guide. Suddenly clients begin streaming in: a persistent, handsome TV personality; a terrified bride-to-be; a missing husband with suicidal tendencies…all challenge Sonia’s astrological abilities to prevent a crime. All apparently isolated experiences, but bound by an invisible thread. And while Sonia has stellar success in unraveling the truth, very soon she’ll have to look closely at her own stars. Because the most notorious international criminal has just crossed Sonia’s path–and he has his own plans for her future!”
  20. In the miso soup by Ryu Murakami
    • “It is just before New Year’s. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank’s behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn’t until the second night, however, in a scene that will shock you and make you laugh and make you hate yourself for laughing, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.”

As always, feel free to include your own recommendations in the comments below!