Listen:

When I was a younger man—ten years ago, a full head of hair ago, four hundred books ago…

When I was a much younger man, I visited a Books-a-Million in the mall for a book by Kurt Vonnegut.

It could have been any of his books.

I asked the young cashier for a recommendation.

She led me to a shelf and pointed at a sky-blue book with a vacant birdcage on the cover beside the title: Cat’s Cradle.

The book is an apocalyptic tale narrated by a man who told us to call him Jonah. Written as a flashback, Cat’s Cradle follows Jonah’s quest to write a book about what famous Americans were doing the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The book also introduces an absurd religion (aren’t they all?) called Bokononism, led by its creator, Bokonon.

Reading Cat’s Cradle for the first of many times felt like finding a map to navigate the rest of my life despite never realizing such a map ever existed or lacked in my life in the first place. The string game of Cat’s Cradle reflects the way the book explores truth and how people choose to accept certain small lies, or foma, to make themselves feel better about the world.

Busy, busy, busy.

I always wanted to be a writer. As it happened—As it was meant to happen, Bokonon would say—discovering Cat’s Cradle and consuming it in the days thereafter challenged everything I knew about what a book could be. This would be compounded by Vonnegut’s other books, which are rife with trips to outer space, doodles inked by the author, as well as visits from Vonnegut himself. Humans are only confined by the abstract limits we set for ourselves. No limits existed for Vonnegut.

I’d like to think the cashier who suggested the book is a member of my karass, teams that do God’s Will without discovering what they’re doing. I never saw her after that transaction, and she likely forgot me by the end of her shift. But the book she sold me changed my life.

Since reading Cat’s Cradle, my thirst for books has become insatiable. I’m passionate about collecting, reading, and learning from them. They teach me empathy and expand my understanding of the world and the disparate people who inhabit it. That book guided me to an English degree, fiction workshops, and a writing career. I am me because of Cat’s Cradle.

As I navigate the world, dodging the periodic pool-pah and avoiding granfalloons, I occasionally tell myself foma to trick myself into thinking I have a decent understanding of the world and what’s to come.

And whenever I worry about life and its grand meaning, I return to my favorite Calypso from The Books of Bokonon:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.”

The best story I read as a kid was and remains unpublished. The total number of people who have read the manuscript is probably five, my nuclear family. It was written by my mother, it was called Mud & Pearls, and when I finished the last page, I cried to the point of hyperventilating. I could not believe something so beautiful had been created within the walls of my house. To sum it up – the story was about a young girl stuck for three months on an oceanographic ship and therefore missing her middle school play back on land; she would have been Dorothy.

Mud & Pearls taught me three things that basically charted/wrecked the rest of my life: 1) the stories are writable; 2) some of the best art never makes it above water; and 3) perhaps most detrimentally, it cemented my already desperate love of theatre.

Though my mother has published a slew of I Can Reads and picture books, she never published that story. She will not publish it. It will die in a cardboard box in our basement in Ohio. I can tell you it involved an oceanographer, redeemable father, who came to understand, over the course of his research trip, that his daughter’s misery was in great part due to his disinterest and negligence, and so yes he does attend her production of The Wizard of Oz, staged in the galley with the industrious help of the ship’s Cook.

Other works shocked and awed me too, not just the ones made in-house. Sarah, Plain and Tall said that sometimes life is as beautiful as the colors of the sea. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, confirmed that, ayup, you can wake up one day with your monstrosity on full display, and then an apple is lodged in your back and rots there, and then you die; life is 100% terrifying, and no, an explanation will not be provided. The most meta of all the awes was encountering The Outsiders. My god. The story is the essay is the story is the essay. Ponyboy was writing this all along. Wait. What?! My god.

Reading taught me to believe in the idea of living a life, even if narrative has little relation to actual life as we actually live it. Characters taught me facets of companionship beyond the anxious realms of human interaction. Books (published & unpublished) taught me that stories are writable, if you dare, if you are lucky enough to have any goddamn talent for it, if you are brave enough to write under water, possibly forever, possibly without your stories ever once reaching above the surface and into the light.

Great literature isn’t supposed to make you consider selling your own children. But when I read “The Good Earth,” Pearl S. Buck made me so poor, so ravenous and so desperate I was stunned to find myself feeling for a man contemplating the sale of his daughter into slavery. When I closed that book, I was amazed how I had just lived a different life. A life that made me think more gently of people who bore the grinding weight of hideous choices.

I was that child with really thick rhinestone-studded glasses who secretly pledged in second grade to read every book in the school library. (I started with books in the “A” section and made it through “H” before I had to move to a new school.) So by the time I read “The Good Earth” in my 20s, I had read scores of books I adored. But “The Good Earth” was the first book that knocked me over in that way -- allowing me to live a life so foreign to my own.

This is why I read and why I write: to crawl inside someone else’s skin and feel what they feel, see what they see. And maybe become a little more compassionate, a little more open-hearted when I crawl back out.

I initially read “The Good Earth” because Pearl S. Buck set my mother on a path. As a day-dreamy girl, she read every book by Buck she could and dreamed of living in China. Which is why, when given the choice, my mother urged my father to move our family to Taipei. Sometimes people stumble upon another culture in which they feel more at home than in their own. My mother was like that – somehow more at ease with her Chinese friends than with most Americans. While Buck showed me how stories could allow me to become other selves, Buck’s writing helped my mother find a place where she could be more herself.

And then there is my second daughter. Whose birth mother faced the very dilemma of whether to give up her child. Not to sell her. Not into slavery. But to lay her 1-day-old baby in a bundle on the concrete steps of Fuzhou orphanage, so 10 months later I could adopt her. I cannot pretend to know what terrible force of circumstances propelled that woman to lay this sweet girl on those hard steps. But once I was poor. Once I was famished. Once I knew the press of terrible choices. And sometimes I think of my daughter’s birth mother. And I wish there was a book in China that could transport her and let her know the joy she gave by placing that baby on those concrete steps.

Before I had books, I had my mother. Whenever I did something unkind she’d take my hand and ask in earnest,“How would you feel if someone did that to you?” She planted the seeds of empathy. Books have since been the water that’s made them grow.

There is no writer who better employs and invites empathy than James Baldwin. When I first read Notes of a Native Son, I was 17 and in a school that was entirely white save for three Black students. I'd experienced little of the world. His collection of essays tells the story of his inner and outer life with such eloquence and force, however, that the world cracked wide open before me even though I'd never left my desk.

Sure, I had liberal parents and read “the classics” that interrogated race in America, like To Kill a Mockingbird. But while Lee’s work highlighted the destructive nature of racism, it was also a story told from the perspecitve of a privileged white girl where the Black characters seemed more plot device than human. Notes of a Native Son was different.

I can never know what it's like to be Black in America, but Baldwin's unflinchingly honest invitation into his mind creates a level of intimacy with the reader that makes it impossible to distrust the sincerity of his account and makes plain how the universal human condition binds us all, even with people you once considered "other". I'd argue that while any good book offers the chance to explore someone else's world, Baldwin's both achieves and transcends this - it makes you better understand your own.

I've since read Baldwin's other work and revisit his pieces often. In the current politcal moment, it's a foregone conclusion that I look to it again now. In re-reading Notes of a Native Son, I've realized that Baldwin not only cultivates empathy, but calls for a nuanced conception of it. He demonstrates that empathy does not equate to pity nor serve as tacit approval. For white Americans to understand the Black experience, pity implies a position of power. True empathy, however, relies on a rejection of the outside circumstances that divide us to see each other as equally human. For liberals to empathize with conservatives, we must recognize the way in which fear and pain can drive a person to act in irrational and dangerous ways. This recognition, however, doesn't mean those actions should be excused. Rather, it provides insight in how to effectively appeal to the actors to change the way they see the world.

Baldwin said, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." Reading has taught me that we are naturally allied by our shared human experience. We should be wary of anything that leads us astray from this truth. So with each new book, my garden of understanding grows. I’ll tend it until winter falls and pray it keeps blooming long after I am gone.