“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.”

Earlier this year I read several blog posts complaining about the 'plague' of important books, and the annoyance people felt when reviewers told them that a specific book was important*. As if awareness was some awful disease we should avoid at all cost.



Well. I don't agree with this. I don't buy in the "everyone knows and cares about it already" narrative, because it's a lie. The need to separate oneself with other people's issues has never been so obvious than in the previous months, so sorry if I'm hurting some people's feelings when other people's lives are at stake, but I do believe that some books are important and [b:Between the World and Me|25489625|Between the World and Me|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451435027l/25489625._SY75_.jpg|44848425] is definitely one of them. I may review it later, when I feel less disheartened by the world. Until then, you'll have to take my word on it, I guess.

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

* I do agree that dealing with an important issue is not enough to make a great book, but that's another question altogether.

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