# Tempest’s Challenge

Last March, I decided to accept **Tempest’s challenge** : read no books by straight white dudes for a year.

Do I need to explain this decision? Do I need to say why I thought it was necessary? I feel like I shouldn’t. Suffice it that when I started, I felt that the reading I’d done in my life had been woefully top-heavy with white men. And I still do. White male authors were pushed on me at every level of my education, and even in my pleasure reading I defaulted to them. Ursula Le Guin’s _The Tombs of Atuan_ was the first book by a woman I can recall reading of my own volition. The first by a person of color? Derek Walcott’s epic poem , as best I can recall. Both books completely changed my way of thinking, yet they were very much the rare exception. I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to realize how long I’d been working under this bias. And I have Tempest to thank.

Here it is April. I did it. It really was not hard. At all. In fact, it was so effortless and so satisfyingly mind-expanding I have felt quite a bit of inertia to continue not reading books by straight white dudes. So please do not take the fact I’m compiling this list as any indication I’m quitting right this second. I do have a small pile of books by straight white dudes waiting for me, accumulated over the year, and I’ll get to them. But maybe, first, I’ll finish this thousand page epic romance by a centuries-dead Japanese woman. And who knows what after that.

I decided to include among the restricted category Latin-American men of European descent, who I think according to the letter of the challenge would have been allowed. I’d read so much fitting that description what with my magic realist obsession that I didn’t think reading more would fit the spirit of the challenge. This is, I realize, an arbitrary line to draw. But they’re all arbitrary lines; the problem is that when we don’t interrogate our lines, they start to dig ruts it’s harder and harder to get out of, until they’re imposing drastic limitations on our understanding and thought. I wanted to pick up and move away from my ruts for awhile.

  1. _The Mount_ by Carol Emshwiller
  2. _Open Veins of Latin America_ by Eduardo Galeano  
  
I got into this one before I’d made the no Latin American dudes rule; I’m listing it here because see above about arbitrary lines, and because I’m really glad I read it. It’s a round indictment of the policies of economic imperialism that have persistently maintained the parasitic hierarchy of the first world over the third for the past five hundred years, maybe the first economics-focused text I’ve ever read, and it seems to me eminently appropriate to the spirit of the challenge.
  3. _Spin_ by Nina Allan
  4. _The Diary of Frida Kahlo_ by Frida Kahlo
  5. _The Bloody Chamber_ by Angela Carter  
  
Stylistically brilliant and intensely immersive for such a thin volume. Now that I’ve read it, I feel rather embarrassed I had not before. Seems obvious now that she has influenced a lot of my favorite people.
  6. _Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House_  
Edited by a white guy, I am only learning now as I dig up the Powells link. Oh well.
  7. _Falling Sky_ by Rajan Khanna
  8. _The Liminal War_ by Ayize Jama-Everett
  9. _In Cold Blood_ by Truman Capote
  10. _Archivist Wasp_ by Nicole Kornher-Stace
  11. _Jagganath_ by Karin Tidbeck
  12. _The Memory of Water_ by Emmi Itaranta
  13. _Tam Lin_ by Pamela Dean
  14. _The Bluest Eye_ by Toni Morrison  
The only Toni Morrison I’ve ever read.
  15. _The Dubious Hills_ by Pamela Dean  
A kind of fantasy novel I didn’t know existed, a sort of sociologial experiment in pocket-universe form. I was fascinated. 
  16. _Parable of the Sower_ by Octavia Butler
  17. _Parable of the Talents_ by Octavia Butler  
I’d been looking forward to these for a long time. They were as brilliant as everyone had promised, but completely different than I’d expected. Harrowing, intense, thought-provoking, expanding my understanding of what fiction can do.
  18. _Wakulla Springs_ by Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan
  19. _The English Patient_ by Michael Ondaatje  
I was fooled by this one. Ondaatje, I learned after the fact, is a Sri Lankan of Portuguese descent.
  20. _The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948 – 2013_ by Derek Walcott  

  21. _A Lady’s Guide to Ruin_ by Kathleen Kimmel  
The first romance I’ve ever read–at least by the modern understanding of that term. I mean, I’ve read _Jane Eyre_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ and _The Romance of the Rose_ and etc, do those count?
  22. _You Have Never Been Here_ by Mary Rickert
  23. _Farthing_ by Jo Walton
  24. _Saffy’s Angel_ by Hilary McKay
  25. _Dog Friday_ by Hilary McKay  
Delightful, contemporary, non-genre middle grade: I don’t think I’d ever read any of that before.
  26. _Malinche_ by Laura Esquivel
  27. _This Changes Everything_ by Naomi Klein
  28. _Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter_ by Astrid Lindgren
  29. _Prodigies_ by Angelica Gorodischer
  30. _Jaguar of Sweet Laughter_ by Diane Ackerman
  31. _The Buried Giant_ by Kazuo Ishiguro
  32. _The Winged Histories_ by Sofia Samatar  
  
The best thing I read this year. Brilliant mythmaking heartwrenchingly focused on love and war. I almost want to call it a mosaic novel. _A Stranger in Olondria_ was great, but this is better.
  33. _Signal to Noise_ by Silvia Moreno Garcia
  34. _Lifelode_ by Jo Walton  
Another brilliant thought experiment through worldbuilding, of a kind with and possibly intended in conversation with Pamela Dean’s _The Dubious Hills_ above. Both are novels about how people fit together, how people help each other be themselves. I want to call them utopian novels—I could fit them in with Le Guin’s _The Dispossessed_ , but using fantasy tropes instead of SF—but I think I’d be misusing “utopian” the way most people think on it. More about that in another post, maybe.
  35. _The Goblin Emperor_ by Katherine Addison
  36. _Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala_ by Diane M. Nelson
  37. _The Tale of Genji_ by Murasaki Shikibu  
  
Eleven hundred pages of quite dense ninth century Japanese court intrigue, considered the world’s first novel. I’ve been reading this off and on since I started the challenge, and I’m not yet halfway through, but I’ll get there. It is quite a thing.



If I may sum up, then: this was amazing. It has changed the way I think about writing and fiction and people and the world. I shall continue in this vein, and I encourage you to try it yourself. If you do, let me know how it goes.

  1. Thank you for the suggestions!