I want to talk today about how reading can change our lives and about the limits of that change.
I want to talk to you about how reading can give us a shareable world of powerful human connection.
But also about how that connection is always partial.
How reading is ultimately a lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking.
The writer who changed my life was the great African American novelist James Baldwin.
When I was growing up in Western Michigan in the 1980s, there weren't many Asian American writers interested in social change.
And so I think I turned to James Baldwin as a way to fill this void, as a way to feel racially conscious.
But perhaps because I knew I wasn't myself African American, I also felt challenged and indicted by his words.
Especially these words: "There are liberals who have all the proper attitudes, but no real convictions.
When the chips are down and you somehow expect them to deliver, they are somehow not there." They are somehow not there.