I agree with your point. It would be nice to read about varying personalities, experiences & perspectives!dhwanis wrote:I believe that it is more on the kind of books that we are exposed to. Living in India, I spent a major part of my childhood reading books like Enid Blyton and Agatha Christies...where all the characters were white. But, as my reading developed, I made a conscious effort to look for books that had more diversity...and now I make sure I pick up books written by various authors from different parts of the world and those who write about different kinds of experiences..and it has made a world of difference. When you read about diverse characters, you understand and empathise with more people in real life
Thoughts on Diversity in Books
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Re: Thoughts on Diversity in Books
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I think many people would be interested in seeing and understanding the world from different perspectives, such as different cultures, subcultures, races and sexualities. However, vanilla fiction is safe and a selling staple, which is why one doesn't often see diversity in the fiction aisles. The other problem is that characters of a different race, culture or sexuality can easily become token mouthpieces for political and social commentary and lose the humanity that motivates a reader to empathise with the character and care about their story. Nobody likes to be preached to, especially if one senses an "us versus them" barrier in the story. Token characters can also feel contrived, as if they were shoehorned into the story for PC reasons instead of naturally occurring there.
As it was mentioned in previous posts, encouraging different demographies to write stories would see this want of diversity disappear naturally. I just wish I could have grown up reading a range of different perspectives, especially more LGBTQ literature.
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What book was it? I'm Filipino as well and I haven't seen a book that talks about Filipino culture so I'm interested in what this book has to say.bruin wrote:I don't think it is rare to find books with diverse characters. I recently just read a young adult book about a Filipino American teenage girl. That was the first time I read about my family's Filipino culture in a YA book, and was thrilled that it exists.
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-- 08 Feb 2017, 05:50 --
As for diversity in character, there are certainly a lot of books, you can find according to your taste.
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However, if people are lacking in the diverse characters when reading certain books I would agree with this quote.
Julie Ditton wrote:I think that there are several issues that contribute to this problem. As Gravy pointed out, supply and demand, as well as author pressure are two of them. But also an author is taught to write what he knows. Thus, since most authors are strait, white able-bodied people, so are most of their characters. They may have diversity in the shopping characters, but not so much in the main character.
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