President's Update - August 9, 2018

I am reading, for the third time, "My Beloved World" by Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in preparation for the One Book, One Community event in East Lansing at the end of August. Justice Sotomayor refers to books and libraries throughout her memoir as the place she sought out as a child, and again as a student at Princeton University, as a calming place, a place of refuge, and where she sought knowledge about the broader world and subjects.

Sotomayor writes after the death of her father when she was nine years old, and the period of her mother's devastating grief, "My solace and only distraction that summer was reading. The Parkchester Library was my haven." She again references libraries as a student at Princeton University. "Whenever I felt out of place or homesick, I took refuge at Firestone Library. Books had seen me through an earlier time of trouble, and their presence all around me was both a comfort and an answer to the question of why I had come here."