Happy New Year book lovers! When you make your New Year’s resolutions, try injecting more diversity into your reading life.
Diversity is all around us, but we often fail to find it in books and other media. Check out my 2018 Diverse Voices Reading Challenge and recommendations to kickstart your journey. This challenge is for readers of all ages!
If you want more information about reading about diversity, please leave a comment or check out my Own Voices Book Recs page.
Dear bloggers and book lovers, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas! I know this time of year can be both relaxing and stressful, so I hope you are practicing good self-care. One of my favourite things about the holiday season is reflecting on the books I’ve read. I covered YA + junior fiction and adult fiction + nonfiction in two separate posts, since I simply had too many favourites this year!
TITLE: El Deafo
AUTHOR: Cece Bell
PUBLISHER: Harry N. Abrams
RELEASE DATE: September 2, 2014
GENRE: Junior Graphic Novel, Memoir
PAGE COUNT: 233
El Deafo is an utterly adorable Own Voices graphic novel based on author Cece Bell’s own childhood experience of severe deafness. One of the many wonderful things about this book is how it avoids representing deafness as a disability. Although Cece faces plenty of adversity in the form of loneliness, being misunderstood, and toxic friends, she ultimately uses her Phonic Ear hearing aid as a superpower to become the hero, El Deafo. This is a universally relatable and informative story for junior and middle grade readers that inspires compassion and respect for differently-abled people. Continue reading
Alison Bechdel is an iconic cartoonist well-known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Her two graphic memoirs apply a psychoanalytical lens to her stranger-than-fiction childhood to paint an intricate portrait of her parents. Considering how the characters and themes link the two narratives, they are better when read together! These memoirs will fascinate lovers of literature with references to great writers, and engross readers who enjoy beautifully structured family biographies. Her perceptiveness left me in awe.
Bechdel’s art is always worth taking the time to appreciate. She uses only one colour (greyish green in Fun Home and red in Are You My Mother?) as a wash over her greyscale illustrations. I was fixated admiring the detail in every frame, and how text and art support each other to articulate meaning more powerfully than either could alone.
TITLE: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me
AUTHOR & ARTIST: Ellen Forney
PUBLISHER: Avery
RELEASE DATE: November 6, 2012
GENRE: Adult Graphic Memoir
PAGE COUNT: 256
In this intimate and informative graphic memoir, comic artist Ellen Forney tells her story of battling bipolar disorder. Along the way, she delves into the origins and issues of the “crazy artist” stereotype, and rewrites her own identity as a creator with mental illness. Most of all, Marbles is for readers who want insight into the long-term challenges of living with bipolar disorder.
Continue reading
TITLE: The Camera My Mother Gave Me
AUTHOR: Susanna Kaysen
PUBLISHER: Knopf
RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2001
GENRE: Nonfiction, Memoir
PAGE COUNT: 149
In this soul-bearing memoir by the author of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen chronicles her relationship with her vagina. When this under-appreciated part of her anatomy starts to hurt, destroying her sex life, her vagina suddenly becomes the centre of her universe. Susanna is forced to analyse her new relationships with emotional abuse and chronic pain, and how all this impacts her identity as a woman… in a nutshell, everything you’re not supposed to talk about in public.
Continue reading
Using her wealth of experience as an international model, bestselling crime novelist, human rights activist, and mother, Tara Moss equips readers to confront gender inequality in every aspect of society. If The Fictional Woman is the ultimate “beginner’s guide” to gender inequality, then Speaking Out is your “travelling companion”. Through immersive research and intimate wisdom, this dynamic duo will educate and empower.
I listened to The Fictional Woman and Speaking Out as audio books, and now have a HUGE crush on Tara Moss’s voice. As a strong and confident speaker, her warmth and wisdom bursts through her rich tone. Hearing the author read her own work is intimate, and sometimes unearthed my own pain. Although I plan to buy all my female friends and family members these books for Christmas, I know I’ll be returning to the audio versions.
TITLE: Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
EDITOR & PHOTOGRAPHER: Susan Kuklin
PUBLISHER: Candlewick Press
RELEASE DATE: February 11, 2014
GENRE: Young Adult Nonfiction, LGBTQIA
PAGE COUNT: 192
Through six short memoirs transcribed from interviews, Beyond Magenta explores what it’s like to come of age as a trans-spectrum teen. A crucial lesson this book teaches is to see gender and sexuality as something with infinite colourful shades. To really know someone’s story, you have to be humble and open-hearted enough to listen to them tell it in their own words.
Continue reading
TITLE: Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
EDITORS: Kate Bornstein & S. Bear Bergman
PUBLISHER: Seal Press
RELEASE DATE: August 21, 2010
GENRE: Nonfiction, Memoir, LGBTQI+
PAGE COUNT: 304
The second gender-bending anthology edited by Kate Bornstein brings together an extraordinary range of trans-spectrum creators. This book celebrates diverse LGBTQI+ experiences, while encouraging readers to take a long, hard look at their society’s gender laws.
Instead of looking to the binaries for answers – male/female, femininity/masculinity, sex/gender – I’ve decided to take my body back for myself – for me to shape, show off, love and dress and play. But above all, for me to name – Transliteration by Francisco Fernández
In 2016, I broke out of my reading rut and found some new favourites. Are any of these your favourites? I’d love to hear about the highlights of your year in the comments below!
