There are two open mics tonight and no other readings. This is because everybody is going to be listening to Barack Obama, who is a published author. Like Jen Graves did a few short posts ago, I would like to remind you to read Dreams of My Father. It’s really very good. I would ignore The Audacity of Hope, though, unless you buy the audio book version of it because you like to hear Barack Obama talk.

I would like to take issue with something that Jen Graves said. In the above-referenced post, she writes:

What’s the last book that a billion white people read that was even marginally about race, and that wasn’t treated academically?

In the comments, Brendan Kiley says:

How about Toni Morrison, for starters?

And Jen Graves responds:

Brendan: Toni Morrison isn’t a bestseller. She’s an English class writer. Hence, my distinction from academia.

But you said for starters: What else?

First of all, this is wrong. Beloved is a bestseller many, many times over, in two different decades. But never mind that. If you want to call someone an English class writer (and we will have fisticuffs one day, Ms. Graves, over that term. By extension, does this mean that most visual artists are simply interior decorators for bored rich people?), here’s one example of a popular book: James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother was a bestseller when it first came out and still sells very well. I would also recommend it to those of you who have read Dreams of My Father and would like to read more about being mixed-race. It’s not as beautiful, but it is insightful.

Rick Bragg also talks a lot about race in All Over But the Shoutin’, which was a bestseller, and more recently, Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family is a more melting-pot study of life in the Bronx. It’s about a Latino family, but the book is all about the modern face urban race and class relations. And it was on the bestseller lists for like a half a year, and a book club favorite, and the kind of book (like Guns, Germs and Steel) that inspired non-book-buyers to wander into bookstores and say “Do you have this book? My friends are reading it and it sounds interesting.”

And that is why the delightful Ms. Graves is wrong for this one time.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.