“What mattered was that she appreciated the value of literature. When some idiot politician or finger-wagging do-gooder complained about the books on school reading lists because they dared to treat adolescents with respect, or acknowledge that issues of race, sexuality, and gender might be of some relevance to them as they strode the path to adulthood, he would always make the same remark: “It’s not the people who read books you have to worry about, but the people who don’t.”