Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Late, late, late POC update

Yes, this is an update on the Person of Color Challenge 2010. I'm very, very late. Blog updating has just completely fallen off my radar recently, so I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things.

This challenge involved coming up with a list of books that focused on characters of color and trying to read all of them last year. I pretty much failed miserably. Here's my original post at the start of the challenge. Below are the links to the rest of the posts from the challenge:
Out of my original list of 12 books to read, I read 4 and a half. That's not so good. I did get an additional POC book out of The Red Pyramid, which was not on my initial list, and I also read the sequel to Chains, Forge, which I loved. Oh, and I started La femme sans sépulture, which I have enjoyed so far, but put aside for easier reading in English.

As I predicted, the "adult" books took me quite a lot longer to read than my normal YA/children's fare, and I have basically abandoned All Aunt Hagar's Children, which was super depressing. I still intend to pick it up and finish it, but who knows.

A lot of the books on my list fell into my personal "serious" reading category (adult, often classics, anything in French falls into this category), which I can usually only tackle one at a time, often with long breaks in between, and I think this contributed to not getting further through my list. I picked up several non-POC "serious" books throughout the year (a couple theology books, since my husband is in divinity school, and an Anthony Trollope novel, which took from late November to early January to plow through). While many of the books on the list remain on my "to read" list, I'm not going to try to finish the list this year--especially not with it being already April, yeep! However, I will try, as I browse children's and YA books, to try to make more effort to choose books with POC protagonists.