I have a pile of antiracism books on my bedside stand, and every month when my antiracism book club announces next month’s title, I hope that it will be one of those books. So far, it’s only happened once. Which means I keep being introduced to new books, but I haven’t made much progress on my bedside stand book pile.

The most recent title we read for book club was Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.

To the extent that So You Want To Talk About Race helped me learn and examine without feeling profoundly uncomfortable, this book asked me to challenge and examine WHILE feeling incredibly uncomfortable.Despite my discomfort, I found myself reaching for a pen and an old envelope again and again to write down quote after quote from Lorde’s thoughtful, incredibly challenging book.

Lorde invites curiosity and introspection about a range of subjects, including anger, privilege, racism, identity, and the erotic.

There was searing commentary about race, but some of things that were most thought-provoking were about other ideas. One of Lorde’s essays invites the reader to allow the erotic to inform other area’s of one’s life: to allow the feeling of being satisfied to be a feeling we can experience and trust in our work and other pursuits. Sometimes we are so pigeon-holed by our society’s ideas of how we ought to be that we forget that reality is very interconnected and isn’t well suited to the boxes we divide it into.

I listened to the audio book, and I had to replay a number of sections because I felt like I just didn’t get it the first time. Once I got the paper copy of the book from the library, I also re-read sections of it.Lorde is an academic. Her writing required a higher level of attention than many of the books I read. I appreciated the challenge, and re-listening, re-reading, and talking about the ideas with the book club really helped me with reading comprehension and digesting ideas. The more time I’ve had to mull over the ideas in Sister Outsider, the more I understand and value what I read.