Censorial authorities tend to be squeamish about regularly scheduled public reminders of their censorial habits. Goes without saying but obviously needs to be said: the last thing you should expect in a country that bans books is an annual Banned Books Week. This is lost on the American Library Association, which has been at it for 43 years now. Or at least it hopes that it’s lost on you.
The campaign’s website ranks George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue as the previous year’s No. 1 “most challenged” book: a plausible description, if you think about it, though it’s not generally considered polite. No, what the campaign means by “challenged” is the much less interesting fact that someone or other has tried to remove the book from public classrooms. (I once removed an issue of Philosophy Now from my school library, by way of window, for its nonsensical cover story “Four Kinds of Ethical Robots.”) Anyway, Johnson’s paperback is available on Amazon for $10.28, and the book is free on Kindle Unlimited.
Having failed to make the top ten, here’s Stephen King, the king of horror and prince of paradox: “I am now the most banned author in the United States — 87 books. May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about?” Bravely speaking truth to power, and so on. O, unhappy is the land that needs heroes! Someone who writes for a living should be more attuned to irony. None of King’s books is banned in the United States, though it’s true that dozens of them are unreadable. The philosopher and sociologist İsmail Beşikçi, whose books in the Republic of Türkiye really are banned, couldn’t ask you to simply have a read. He can’t print or distribute most of his books in that country, and not only because he spent 17 years in prison for writing them. To get your hands on a copy of International Colony Kurdistan you’ll need to go to places even dodgier than the Hudson in JFK Terminal 8.
The ALA is an interest group, and Banned Books Week is a catchy fundraising campaign. There are worse things. But used in the context of literature and the wretched history of censorship, the word ban has a specific meaning. It evokes China’s “great firewall,” Iran’s sinister Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, section 301 of the Turkish penal code, samizdat, the Edict of Worms, Galileo, Erasmus, the exile of Ovid. The very opposite of parents’ having a say in the matter of public school curricula. The very opposite of the U.S. government’s getting out of the broadcasting business: censorial states have no choice but to get into it, in fact. My no longer being forced to fund NPR doesn’t “silence” Leila Fadel. Let her and her co-hosts compete for revenue and donations like the rest of us. And I’ll continue to take John Milton’s advice and read promiscuously; I’ll pay for shipping.