Reading matters deeply

In Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu’s polemic against the professional managerial class, she calls attention to how Obama talked about reading in the waning days of his presidency. In his farewell address on January 10, 2017, he said: Social attitudes oftentimes take generations to change. But if our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction—Atticus Finch—who said “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Obama paraphrased this line a few days later, in an interview with Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times book review, where he said that reading allowed him to “get in somebody else’s shoes.” It’s a curious reference. Finch is the white lawyer who represents a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The villain in the…