What I've been reading

[sarahmichigan]

"Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I enjoyed the essays on science and culture best. I also find that his injection of humor into his writing makes the hard science more accessible. (Bonus: Neil talking to Jon Stewart. Apparently he got hate mail from elementary school kids for "killing" Pluto.)

and

"Titan" by John Varley. J. and I are Varley fans, and when he recently decided to re-read the Titan trilogy as books on CD, I decided to join in. It's as trippy as I remember it being when I first read it 15-odd years ago.

My full comments on both books here.

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Incidentally, if I were doing the "50 books by People of Color" challenge as some are, "Death" would be my first one for the year. I'm not planning to do the challenge, but it did make me curious about my numbers from previous years. It's a little complicated by not always knowing, just by an author's name, if s/he is a POC. Also, determining who is a POC is a little difficult due to the slipperiness of racial categories. For instance, many are counting Indian authors as people of color, but racially, people from India are "Caucasian."

But, anyway, to my best estimation, my counts from previous years were:
2006: 4 books out of 51 by POC; 3 different authors (2 novels by Octavia Butler)
2007: 12 books out of 52 by POC; 7 different authors (6 books by Octavia Butler)
2008: 1 out of 53 by a POC

Comments

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

I think who you qualify as "POC" (a loathesome term, in my opinion) depends on what your motivation for doing the exercise is. If the point is to get the perspectives of authors who are not products of Western world white privilege, then Southeast Asians and Indians (whether native or diaspora) ought to count. If the point is to get the perspectives of authors who grew up in the Western World suffering the results of institutionalized white-privileged racism, then I wouldn't even include native African (except South African) or South American authors.

[crm17.livejournal.com]

Neil talking to Jon is one of my favorite dailyshow interviews.