I’ll pass on Dreams from My father

 I looked forward to reading Dreams from My Father because I found it important to read the inner life and background of someone I used to look up to. However, after 50 pages of reading Obama’s romantic retelling of his childhood, I decided that reason was not strong enough to finish the book. So I stopped. This book would have been the seventh contemporary memoir of a Black man that I have read. These books have been valuable to me as I navigate my own identities, but I’ve reached a point where I’m more interested in hearing the life stories of people radically different from my own. Dreams from My Father is squarely in my comfort zone, and that made me uncomfortable while reading it.