>James Baldwin is such an efficient writer, he always seemed to convey exactly what the scene needed and no more

Couldn't disagree more. I know I'm in the minority, but I really struggled to get through even 30 pages of Giovanni's Room.

So many of Baldwin's sentences seemed to spill into the next, and the next. There was constant reiteration and repetition. Like he was always grasping to say something profound. Occasionally he would.

Apparently, he was heavily inspired by the rhetoric of gospel preachers. The whole church-pastor-delivery doesn't sit well with me.

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>Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

I just can't see this as 'efficient writing'. I can understand how other people enjoy it, don't get me wrong. But yeah. Not for me.