How This Election Has Affected My Reading

Photo credit: mrbill78636 via Foter.com / CC BY

Apparently angry reading is a thing.

I had not known that until Wednesday morning. I was crying while walking my dog, but then something magical happened: I looked into a Little Free Library as we were walking past and happened to see a copy of The Reader. Jackpot! I had almost bought it a few days beforehand, but had restrained myself for the sake of my wallet and my already over-burdened bookshelf. But I did not hesitate to snag it from the LFL.

Like many people, I was in desperate need of some comfort last week, and if you know anything about me, you probably know by now how much I love reading. So of course I looked to books for my comfort.

But comfort is not the same as escaping. Although we all use fiction as a means of escape, personally, I find it to be difficult-to-impossible to shut down my brain and immerse myself totally in what I’m doing (I know, I need to be more Zen).

I kept trying to wrap my brain around how this country – the same one that elected a black man named Barack Obama. Twice. – could have voted such a hater into office. Everything he says and does is disgusting and the idea of him in the White House is nothing short of terrifying.

While mulling all this over, open book in hand, I noticed the author, Traci Chee, is an Asian American. And I felt a little better. It felt like a tiny stab at all the haters, my own little revolution, to be reading a book by someone who does not fit into Trump’s version of America.

That led me to start looking over all the unread books sitting on my shelves and mentally pick out the ones written by POC. Just off the top of my head, I probably have enough to read exclusively books by people of color for at least 5-6 months. I don’t actually plan to go that far, if only because my book club voted on A Man Called Ove for our January meetup and I’ve been wanting to read that one for a while. Also I still have to finish Dark Matter.

But I will be reading primarily books by POC for the foreseeable future. Because I can rant against racism all I want (and I am and I will), but one of the most powerful things I can do is to help POC tell their own stories. To let them enrich my life with their awesomeness. To do my tiny part to show Trump and his supporters and the book stores and the publishers that I do want to read books by non-white authors. That they have value, not just to themselves and each other, but to all of us. America always has been and always will be the great Melting Pot and that’s one of the best things about it. There is an incredible richness of culture and experience here, but we can only take advantage of it if we open up our hearts and minds to the stories that everyone has to tell.

So that’s what I’m doing. It’s not much, but it makes me feel a little bit better because I get to read while feeling like I’m doing something against the onslaught of hate and oppression that has suddenly taken over our country. I voted for Hillary on November 8th, but there are other ways to continue to make my voice heard, and hopefully to help elevate the voices of others, and this is one of them.

I currently have a backlog of about two months’ worth of book reviews on my blog ready to go, so you guys won’t see this change immediately. But come 2017, you can bet you’ll be seeing a lot more reviews of books by Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and LGBTs. Because that’s the America I believe in.

What about you guys? Have any of you decided to change any of your reading habits after the election? If so, how and why?