Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

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.

I took those words very literally.

Where should I put myself?

I went to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions in the United States.

This is a place shaped by a powerful history.

In the 1960s, African Americans risked their lives to fight for education, to fight for the right to vote.

I wanted to be a part of that change, to help young teenagers graduate and go to college.

When I got to the Mississippi Delta, it was a place that was still poor, still segregated, still dramatically in need of change.

My school, where I was placed, had no library, no guidance counselor, but it did have a police officer. Half the teachers were substitutes and when students got into fights, the school would send them to the local county jail.

This is the school where I met Patrick.

He was 15 and held back twice, he was in the eighth grade.

He was quiet, introspective, like he was always in deep thought.

And he hated seeing other people fight.

I saw him once jump between two girls when they got into a fight and he got himself knocked to the ground.

Patrick had just one problem.

The healing power of reading

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