Via Bookgirl, here is an examination of how inclusive my own reading has been:

1. Name the last book by a female author that you’ve read.
   Persuasion by Jane Austen. I finished it on April 18.
2. Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you’ve read.
   Wow, it has been a really long time since I read anything by an African or African-American author. Looks like it was Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying in July 2007.
3. Name one from a Latino/a author.
   That’s going to be really hard. Probably Judith Ortiz Cofer’s novel The Line of the Sun, and I’ll bet I read it in 1991 or 1992. Yikes. It’s no consolation, I suppose, that works by Isabelle Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Laura Esquivel are on my list if I haven’t actually picked them up, right?
4. How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?
   This is bad, too, but probably Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies back in 2006.
5. What about a GLBT writer?
   Probably The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde in July 2007, unless, that is, I’ve read an author not knowing whether or not he/she was GLBT.
6. Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you’re feeling lucky?
   Ha, ha! That one’s just cruel. My book club read Reading Lolita in Tehran, but I had already read it, so I didn’t do a re-read. I read it in November 2005.
7. Any other “marginalized” authors you’ve read lately?
   I guess maybe Native American writer Louise Erdrich. Her novel The Plague of Doves was one of my favorites last year.

So how about you? How diverse is your reading?