- I really should be blogging more. I have a lot of excuses, mostly centered around writing a master's paper all semester, but really, they are just excuses. I enjoy keeping this blog, and I have missed it.
- A quarter into the year seems like a good time to check out my reading stats for the year.
What really interested me though is examining what I have been reading. By gender, my reading is pretty even - 14 books by male authors, and 19 books by female authors. I think in the past I have read even more heavily female, but this was not terribly surprising. When I looked at my reading by race, however, it was a little dispiriting. I read 20 books by people of color, and 13 books by white authors. Yes, that means I read more books by people of color than I read books by white authors, but this was in a three month period when I was actively trying to read outside of my own experiences. When I needed to read a transitional reader for my children's lit class, I worked pretty hard to find the one transitional reader I could find that had a non-white character (and the book I found was great - if you need a good book for a fairly new reader who is looking for slightly more advanced books, you should definitely point them to Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything by Lenore Look). Or when I needed an historical fiction novel, I choose Sugar by Jewell Parker Rhodes.
This is not completely true. After seeing Matt de la Peña speak at the Durham Public Library last month, everyone I knew was reading his books, and I too read the ones I hadn't yet read, all in quick succession (you should go pick up The Living and The Hunted right now, unless you are about to go on a cruise, in which case you should wait until you get back). And I keep up with blogs like Reading While White and American Indians In Children's Literature, which put different books in front of me, so that I am adding them to my Goodreads list. But still the majority of books that are casually mentioned to me are still pretty white, and mostly American.
So, I will keep up this journey of reading books that are more windows for me into a world different than my own, rather than mirrors. Mirrors are good, but they are not what I need right now. So I am going to sign off for now, and delve back into Kwame Alexander's new novel in verse Booked, and we will see where the second quarter of the year takes me.