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.)

Do you read literary magazines? Give your reason through the link here.

My weekend was a quiet one. I puttered around my gutters a bit and washed my car, but didn’t accomplish a whole lot. Today I had to go in to work for a while, because every year on September 1 it is my obligation to give an orientation lecture on the library to our new students. Such are the sacrifices I make for my calling.

I read Leif Enger’s new book, So Brave, Young and Handsome. I’ll review it tomorrow. I’ll just say now that I liked it quite a lot, and would have been surprised if I hadn’t.

Then I read a Dean Koontz, Ticktock. Delightful. I started another, The Voice of the Night, which is an early book, and quickly gave me hints that it was one of the unpleasant ones he wrote before he found his voice, so I cast it aside into the outer darkness. Now I’m reading Twilight Eyes, and liking it a lot.

Hope you had a good holiday.

The title of this post probably suggested to you one of two things. Either I’m going to make fun of some leftist academic who derides western literature and education as a tool of capitalist oppressors, or I’m going to attack some work of literature that seems to me totalitarian in its ideas.

I’m going to do neither. I’m going to talk about the history of literacy. Because it’s a fact, I believe, that historically, literacy has been a tool of tyranny (Bear with me. It moves on from there). Continue reading Literacy as a tool of tyranny →

Mr. Bertrand recommends How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

In England, some authors are asking why people appear to be buying books but not reading them.