My Beloved World (by Sonia Sotomayor)

For the RHC category "memoir by a Latinx author," I selected Sonia Sotomayor's memoir. It covers her childhood and ends with her achieving her lifelong dream of becoming a judge; she deliberately does not cover her time on the Supreme Court or talk about her jurisprudence.

I enjoyed spending time with Sotomayor and learning more about her and Puerto Rican culture, although like most political memoirs, hers not as candid as it could be. I also wished we could spend more time with the adult judge Sotomayor; instead, this really is mostly about her childhood and upbringing with a view towards inspiring young people who grow up facing similar hardships to follow in her footsteps. 

This quote is in the introduction, and it ultimately sums up the lesson of this book for me: "Experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today."