Six Degrees of Ellison

I’m only about a quarter of the way into reading Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act, a collection of critical and social essays, and like many compelling books, it’s throwing concepts and writers and books at me at such a furious pace that I’ve already started adding new titles to my To Read list.
First off, it makes me want to go back and read Invisible Man.  All I can imagine is that I will have a greater appreciation for this novel. 
The essay “Richard Wright’s Blues” has gotten me curious to read Native Son and Black Boy, neither of which I have read before.
“Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction”:  I haven’t read Crane since college so it’s time to rediscover his work.
There’s also so much to learn about the historical context of race and racism at the burgeoning of the Civil Rights era.  See all those books behind me?  Start reading! This is all to say that a good book gets you thinking beyond its own borders.  It touches social context, artistry, political thought, philosophy, religious beliefs.  It awakens a hungering curiosity that wants to devour the entire world. 
For example, in his essay on “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison discusses the works of Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner.  Connecting all these dots, he is performing a sort of literary Six Degrees of Separation.
Ellison leads to Twain leads to Crane leads to considering other writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, then on to writers I have yet to experience, like Alice Munro and Doris Lessing, Kenzaburo Oe and Mario Vargas Llosa. 
Which of course gets me to thinking about non-Nobel winners, those writers fashioning their own generation of literature to influence the future.  The writers whose names I haven’t heard of yet but will.
All this from the first 80 pages of Ellison’s book.  That’s what I love about reading.