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I agree somewhat with the writer who said "most Black people don't read'. I find that most people, in particular young people, only read a book when it's absolutely necessary (i.e. - if required by a teacher). I, on the other hand, am a member of a Bookclub that will be celebrating it's 25th Anniversary next year in 2020. We read all kinds of books by African-American authors and people of color, once a month. We have turnover but remain consistent with about 20 members, and I would be remiss if I didn't note that we are supported by our local library. This is where we meet and it is an open opportunity for anyone in the community, but the members tend to be older - a lot of retirees - and people who have worked as educators or in the social sciences, also for the most part black and female.

The challenge with numbers is if applied wrongly can destroy us - since the only numbers I experiment with is in cooking - I'll leave it to the professionals and enthusiasts. Speaking of which, my oldest daughter's sister is at Harvard right now because she's some kind of math wiz... she's only 15 - I admire her - she probably knows about perfect numbers and their uses

Damn, what's up with all of these one line responses for the past few days? Is it my perspective or have people totally lost the desire to even hold a discussion on a topic? Poster #1: I believe there's life on Mars Poster #2....3 days later: No, I don't agree with that ....and that's it. Nothing else to add or say. Chevdove @Chevdove is the only one I can count on to give some actual SUBSTANCE in her response. Ok Troy, I'm just venting a little.....lol. If you want to you can go ahead and erase this thread after a few people see it.

@Pioneer1 do you remember Del's response? I don't.

Thanks a bunch! That'll help us out alot. We're glad to help with the reviews :-)

Because I knew I'd get the response he just gave....lol. Either that or a post consisting of just a link and no other context.

What made it interesting to you? Did you discover something not previously discussed here?

Kudos to you for giving providing us with a literary hub. Your site and business are unique and much needed. Also, I agree that we need to do better and that it will take time--and hard work. Our schools (in the South) don't do a good job of promoting the arts, so our Club is working hard to reverse that trend.

Missing you @Cynique !!!

@Mel Hopkins WOW! Only 15 and at Harvard!? Now that is amazing!

Hey @Char Backey would you mind if I added your book club's information to AALBC? I have another club on the site that has been together over 25 years years and I have all of their books on the site. I compile Book club information and reading lists to help readers find good books. Here is the Go On Girl! club reading list going back to 1991. They are also committed to buying their books from AALBC. I have collected information on over 700 Black book clubs and virtually all of them have female members. Most Black people in Great Britain read books. Over 80% of Brits will read a book this year. I gave a presentation in Austin this past Saturday, the Austin Black Book Festival. The founder is a sister. The volunteers were from a book club (all sistas), Folktales’ Black Women’s Literary Society Delta Sigma Theta and the Links organizations provided sponsorship and volunteers too. If it were not for the men who presented or sold books. Attendees would have been mostly female Maybe, most Black Men Don't Read. Everyone, we have an online book club here, and are trying to get more folks to participate. The club has started in 1998 the next book we are reading is Sag Harbor.

My suggestion for the August Book would be "Blissfield" by Heather Neff. This book is a coming-of-age tale of a girl named Bethany who arrives in Blissfield, NC to live with her grandmother and befriends two young misfits in the town named Gideon and Nina Price. All three of them have been traumatized by their upbringing and form a bond that is shaken to the core by events that happen in the book, as they grow into adulthood

@Mel Hopkins Google does a lot of hard things really well, but they fail at some relatively easy things. Failure at something simple only comes with consequences if a great of money is lost. The impact on people, the culture, society, or the web are not considered. Google's public behavior illustrates this quite well -- they focus doggedly on where the money is. The benefit of indie sites like AALBC is that you can query the site without having to include the conditions of "African American," "Good," or maybe even "Book" in your query, because the site's focus eliminates the need for this. For example, here on this website, you can run a search on the term "series," and get almost 3,900 results. Now some of these results may not meet your requirements, but I'd be be willing to bet that most of the first 100 results would, as it yields results like Kimberla Lawson Roby, Vanessa Miller, Walter Mosley, and L.A. Banks on the first page. A better way of handling this, on AALBC, would be to add a field to my book table and include series information (name of series, sequence in series, etc). The data is available it is just a matter of updating my database and building a page to highlight these types of books. This is not likely something I'll immediately do because I see no indication that the search volume on "African American Authors with Book Series" is just not high enough to warrant the effort in light of other priorities. All of these pages have been indexed by Google and could show up in Google's search results, but they don't because Google simply is not that good at parsing search results for many categories of web pages and queries. They often return that Mental Floss page listing the "25 Amazing Books by African-American Writers You Need to Read." as a go to page for anything relating to Black books, much like they use Wikipedia for everything else. I have more and better lists of books lists than Mental Floss, but Google has chosen to default to that one Mental Floss page. No amount of SEO will change this as Google puts very little effort into returning quality search results on this subject. The query on "African American authors with book series" is better as they only return one result per domain, so even if the page does not have what you are looking for, you are more likely to find a website that has what you are looking for -- something Google stopped doing a decade ago.

First let me say that my thoughts/opinions are my own. However, our Club was founded because we saw a need to help promote literacy, so I just want to be clear that I'm not speaking on behalf of the Club in this discussion. When I saw the post about Black People Don't Read, I responded as Tanisca. Please note that in the record. So, I live in an urban area, not far from the inner city, but I do research in education so my statement about the gun was not meant as an exaggeration. Also, I think we tend to want to believe all the good things about the best of us and ignore the facts about the rest of us. We know that some black people read, but we also know that many more do not. Some simply don't like to and others, as you've said, read about things that are not all that informative. But on the whole, I believe we are less read than our counterparts. As for the schools, I agree that we should compare apples to apples. Even then, though, African-Americans lag behind. (see https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2017/pdf/2018039LA4.pdf) Admittedly, I have a lot to say about schools, so I'll try not to ramble. There should not be anything such thing as a "bad school." Think about that. What makes the school bad? The Children? The Teachers? The Administration? Policies? Here's the thing. I live in a city where all of our schools are 100 percent charter. A lot of the teachers cannot pass a battery of basic skills tests (Praxis I), yet they stand before our kids on a daily basis trying to teach them when they can hardly read themselves. And yes, the administrators who hire them do so knowing full well that they are hiring an unqualified teacher--but they cite the teacher shortage, etc. Yet, we have some charter schools here who educate the same type of kids, impoverished, inner city...but those kids do well because those schools selective admission, although they're public, and have highly qualified teachers. Same kind of kid but different school environment, so I agree with your point to an extent that schools matter, but research shows that teacher quality is the main factor in increasing a child's reading/math proficiency. And do you know what else, kids who attend those selective public charter schools are required to read a specific number of books per academic year, excluding what the curriculum already requires. So here again, we see that reading has to be forced. I have strong views about black stereotypes, so I understand, I think, why some people are quick to reject a negative truth about us. But just because it's a negative truth does not make it any less than the truth. We have a lot of work to do. Thank you for welcoming my voice and engaging me in this discourse in a professional way. I await your response.

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