Develop good taste and find your own discoveries. If people are just using skin color and gender to promote books then they are using bad criteria. I read plenty of women authors but that is because they meet my criteria, not because of their gender. Seriously I am getting pretty disgusted by the literary curators. I am a reader going his own way.

I like to use “Shut your cry hole” to silence protestors. Fortunately I have a supply of adult pacifiers which work much better.

There is no shame in reading literary analysis. Recently I have been relying on it heavily to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, etc. I do read a lot of plays and I don’t need help to think about dramatic situations. Plays simply are not written to be that difficult to understand. The audience always needs to be able to get it. But poetry is pretty difficult unless you want to ponder every line for days.

If you are studying Greek drama then the Cambridge Translations from Greek Drama provide excellent commentary and background information.

Intelligence can be a curse. I often find myself doing unpaid literary work because I am pondering things and trying to figure out the solution to weighty matters. I can see that a lot of other people have the same problem. I often need to remind myself that nobody is paying me to save the world. Most of the people who are hell bent on making the world a better place have no idea how anything even works. When you do improve your understanding of the world you live in, you had better keep it to yourself because nobody wants to hear it.

My life is guided by my daemon, or inner genius. This concept comes from the ancient Greeks. Genius was never supposed to be about great intelligence. Your genius is the inner god who works through you, mainly through inspiration. Phrases like “The Voice that is Great Within Us”, the title of a famous anthology of poetry, is simply the same concept expressed differently.

I buy all my books and never borrow from the library any more.

I have found that a language barrier can work in your favor. It prevents you from being familiar with a culture. So when you do explore the culture everything seems very novel and exotic, quite the opposite of boring. When you don’t know the language you will always be mystified. Mind you, you might be limited to pop music and subtitled films. I have been studying Spanish for two years and I still cannot read anything more sophisticated than a children’s book.