The BIPOC Book List

I'm going to be reading a lot of books this year. (Photo Credit: Robert Anasch on Unsplash.)

By Anya Shukla

When I applied for a gap year, I told my college that I would spend time “reading and thinking deeply about a list of 50 of the best books of all time.” So far, I have spent as much time “thinking deeply” as I have outside my house (I leave my room so infrequently that it takes several minutes for my eyes to adjust to the sun when I do). Yes, I have read more books by September (238, to be exact) than some people would read in a lifetime. But I wouldn’t exactly call books with shirtless men on the covers and titles like “Beautiful Bombshell” high-class literature. I need to get out of this semi-tragic state of affairs. Not the least because I am literally running out of moderate-to-well-written romance novels to read.

​Cue: a new reading list of 52(ish) books by BIPOC authors. Once a week, I’ll read, rate, and review one of its titles on this blog. I’m hopeful that this can propel me out of my burnout and into a more creative mindset—and/or can help me explore the fun side of prose, the side that’s been overshadowed by analytical essays and college apps. Plus, I GET TO READ MORE BOOKS BY BIPOC AUTHORS! I feel like I don’t read many diverse books, so this will be a good time to expand my literary horizons.

When curating this list, I realized that there actually are a fair amount of BIPOC-written books. (Which is excellent!) I just haven’t heard about most of them. Teachers tend to relegate these novels to the one-section-only “World Literature” English classes; the Goodreads algorithm doesn’t recommend me books by foreign authors. Sigh. ​

That being said, I am excited to dig into this list—there’s a decent spread of race, gender, literary style, and publishing date. I guess I’ll just take it one book at a time and see how it goes. Wish me luck!

The Unofficial BIPOC Book List (in no particular order):

• “Cyclopedia Exotica” (Aminder Dhaliwal)
• “Poetics of Relation” (Édouard Glissant)
• “The Sympathizer” (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
• “Take a Hint, Dani Brown” (Talia Hibbert)
• “The Marrow Thieves” (Cherie Dimaline)
• “The Undocumented Americans” (Karla Cornejo Villavicencio)
• “Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen” (Liliuokalani)
• “Nisei Daughter” (Monica Itoi Sone)
• “Heavy: An American Memoir” (Kiese Laymon)
• “Moth Smoke” (Mohsin Hamid)
• “The Time of the Hero” (Margo Vargas Llosa) 
• “The Book of Unknown Americans” (Christina Henriquez)
• “Super Fake Love Song” (David Yoon)
• “Algorithms of Oppression” (Safiya Umoja Noble)
• “Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Lesson to Her Son” (Homeira Qaderi)
• “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers” (Loung Ung)
• “Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral” (Gabriela Mistral)
• “Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free” (George S. Schuyler) 
• “My People the Sioux” (Luther Standing Bear)
• “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents” (Isabel Wilkerson) 
• “The Trouble with Hating You” (Sajni Patel)
• “Time Is A Mother” (Ocean Vuong)
• “Freshwater” (Akwaeke Emezi) 
• “When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities” (Chen Chen)
• “Arabian Love Poems” (Nizar Qabbani)
• “How It Feels to be Colored Me” (Zora Neale Hurston)
• “Exhalation” (Ted Chiang)
• “Sister Outsider” (Audre Lorde)
• “The President” (Miguel Angel Asturias) 
• “In The Dream House” (Carmen Maria Machado)
• “There There” (Tommy Orange) 
• “The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq” (Hassan Blasim)
• “The Fifth Season” (N.K. Jemisin)
• “Unfinished” (Priyanka Chopra)
• “Behold the Dreamers” (Imbolo Mbue)
• “American Indian Stories” (Zitkála-Šá)
• “Not Your Yellow Fantasy: Deconstructing the Legacy of Asian Fetishization” (Giboom Park)
• “Pride” (Ibi Zoboi)
• “Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” (John McWhorter)
• “Season of Migration to the North” (Tayeb Salih)
• “Midnight Robber” (Nalo Hopkinson)
• “Palace Walk” (Naguib Mahfouz)
• “The Education of Margot Sanchez” (Lilliam Rivera) 
• “For Today I Am a Boy” (Kim Fu)
• “Mexican WhiteBoy” (Matt de la Peña)
• “The Wedding Date” (Jasmine Guillory)
• “When the Chant Comes” (Kay Ulanday Barrett)
• “Mexican Gothic” (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) 
• “Call Me Zebra” (Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi)
• “Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America” (Laila Lalami)
• “Flame in the Mist” (Renée Ahdieh)
• “The Stone Virgins” (Yvonne Vera)
• “Heart Berries” (Terese Marie Mailhot)
• “Love in the Time of Cholera” (Gabriel García Márquez)
• “America is Not the Heart” (Elaine Castillo)
• “The Fire Next Time” (James Baldwin)