Has anyone taken the Challenge?

[netmouse]

In February 2015, K. Tempest Bradford issued A Challenge: Stop Reading White Straight Cis Male Authors for One Year.

Did any of you try that? Or something close?

If you're still looking for things to read, there's a list at the bottom of that article, or you can subscribe to Tempest's web series on her Challenge page.

I sometimes post reviews of what I'm reading on Goodreads. I will try to make more mentions of things here.

What are you reading?

What did you read in the past year that maybe changed your perspective on things?

Comments

[yarram.livejournal.com]

Most of my reading just so happens to qualify for the challenge, because so few of my preferred authors are Straight Cis White Males. I'm currently reading the English translation of 刘慈欣 Liú Cíxīn's Three-Body trilogy and enjoying it, though it's got problems when viewed through a feminist lens. Previously I read the latest installment of Seanan McGuire's InCryptid series, which was a fun romp. And before that was Okorafor's Binti and Akata Witch, which were enjoyable reading, though there are some bumps in the plotting and writing.

None of these works particularly changed my perspective, though Okorafor's writing did introduce me to concepts I'm unfamiliar with (because I'm not Nigerian), incidentally broadening my knowledge of that corner of the world via Google.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I've not 100% taken the challenge, but I guess something close, I'm trying to make sure that when I try new authors, those new authors are not White, Straight, Cis Male. I do have a conflict in this, though, as I'm a member of a book club that is focused on reading "great" works -- and far too many of the (western) classics are by WSCMs.

So far this year, this has resulted in me reading books by:

Katharine Addison
Elizabeth Bear
Jacqueline Carey
Kate Griffin
Laurie J. Marks
Kristine Smith
Megan Whelan Turner
K. B. Spengler
Sofia Samatar
Genevieve Valentine

The club hasn't done too badly this year:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (whiteness unclear)
Ralph Ellison
Virginia Woolf
Lewis Carroll (likely WSCM)
Sun Tzu
Kazuo Ishiguro

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Nope, though I'm always looking for more diversity in my reading lists. Over half of the books I read were by women last year, and one of the reasons it's nearly half is the Russian authors, whom I assume were cis male.

Four minority writers, I'm going to try to increase that, though I consider the Russians as 'other' in important ways. How do I count 12th Century Sufi poetry?