I really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it.

I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.