I have an appreciation of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room at NPR. Here’s the first paragraph:

I was a shy boy of 11, soon to be withdrawn from a Catholic Seminary where I had been bullied and lonely and unhappy, when I found Giovanni’s Room. I was on summer holiday; I used to spend my days reading from my parents’ extensive library, usually on the rattan lounger on the second-floor porch of our house in the small town of Afikpo. I remember feeling a kinship with James Baldwin — not so much with his characters, whom I couldn’t often relate to, but with this melancholy that seeped through his pages. Like Baldwin, and the work he made, I often felt like an anomaly — displaced and always homeless, even in the midst of my quite loving family.

Read the rest at NPR.