Rushdie extolled books as an “intimate exchange between strangers — the writer and the reader,” but he did not speak about free-speech matters or lame YouTube videos that have offended Muslims; I interviewed him about that, and you can read that in my “Patt Morrison Asks” column next week.
Instead, he talked about libraries and his love of libraries as a child, not only the institutional library at his school but the lending library in his town, where he learned about the American justice system from Perry Mason mysteries and read so many Superman comics that, to this day, he said, he can describe the difference between red and green kryptonite: “I know more about that than I should.”
