David Ulin says Banned Books Week is a little difficult for him because it focuses attention on a good topic and trivializes it at the same time.

It’s foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don’t need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.

Books do change things: Just think of “Common Sense,” which lighted the fuse of the American Revolution, or “Mein Kampf,” which laid out the blueprint for Hitler’s Germany.

This reminds me of an essay I saw in a homeschooling magazine/catalog. It referred to parents who feared the Harry Potter books were dangerous and thus should not be read. He said they were dangerous, and that’s why they could be read along with many others. He urged parents to understand that reading only a few books was far worse than reading many of them, because with more reading comes more experience with ideas, words, and images.

Ideas are especially dangerous when taken in small amounts, but when you see or think about many ideas, you have more opportunity to spot the ridiculous ones at first blush and test the good ones against popular bad ones. (link via Books, Inq.)