A few weeks before the conference, with just a handful of notes written and sweating it a little, I realized that part of the problem of developing a list of literary pitfalls had to do with my own desire to derive pleasure from my reading—all of my reading, including the things I chose to read because they interested me and the things I needed to read because reading’s part of my job. In attempting to write a list of pitfalls, then, I found myself mostly wondering about the common ideas, plot elements, stylistic moves, or character traits that detracted from my ability to find the work pleasurable in spite of the good and interesting turns that a particular story took. Racist writing has a long history of being excused by arguments about historical and cultural context (e.g.