By setting myself the task of reincarnating someone, I was inspired by John Milton, who has a line in an essay he wrote where he says that books are not absolutely dead things but do contain the essence of the living intellect that bred them. In other words, that books are alive and that they've got the quintessence of the author inside them.
And I think that everyone who loves books has experienced the feeling of being taken over by another mind. And I suppose one of the things I wanted to do in the book was celebrate the act of reading, which is such a mysterious and not sufficiently remarked upon transaction between two consciousnesses, only one of which needs to be alive.
-Marcel Theroux, http://www.npr.org/2014/02/08/272661891/genre-bending-novel-uses-body-swap-as-a-metaphor-for-reading