Banned Books

I was reading an article recently about banned books. And I love the meme that says as soon as someone bans a book, the best thing you can do is go and read it and find out what they don’t want you to see. There are also some great things about asking a person who suggests banning a book to tell you the exact page, paragraph, sentence that they object to – it seems there are quite a lot of people who want to ban books they’ve never read.

In 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked with a knife when he was about to give a speech. He lost the sight in one eye and received other critical injuries. He survived and has continued to write. As soon as I heard of his attack, I did the only sensible thing I could reasonably do. I bought the Satanic Verses and started reading it. It took a long time for me to read it, because I kept getting distracted by other books and by life in general, and I don’t love magical realism as a genre, and I didn’t understand most of it. But I read it. I didn’t like it, I’m not sure what the fuss is about (either the fuss about it being good, or the fuss about it being dangerous enough that people want to ban the book and kill the author).

But I don’t have to like it. And yes, there are things that one person finds offensive that someone else doesn’t. It certainly isn’t my place to say what people are allowed to be offended by. And given how much of it I didn’t understand maybe I would have found it offensive, had I had a better idea of what was going on.

I then read something about Margaret Atwood’s books being banned (at least one of them). Now, I’m scarred for life as a result of reading and studying Cat’s Eye as a teenager, but that had a lot more to do with teenage girls than with Atwood’s writing, and my shuddering horror of the book does not, in any way, make me think other people should be prevented from reading it. Anyway, it isn’t Cat’s Eye that was banned.

I then had a look at the books on my Kindle. I have 628 books on Kindle, I certainly haven’t read all of them, yet, though I suspect one of the joys of life is to have a list of books to read that is significantly longer than what one could reasonably hope to read in a lifetime, and that expands as rapidly, or more rapidly, than one’s rate of book completion. Of the 628 books that I have, 31 of them have been banned somewhere at some time. And there is at least one other book that I have read (before I owned a Kindle) that has been banned. But anyway, 31 out of 628, that’s 5%.

I find this quite astonishing. I didn’t think my taste in books was particularly subversive. I was expecting there to be maybe 4 or 5 books, not 31. In some cases, these are books that were banned some time ago that are no longer banned (The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde). In some cases, these are books banned under some very specific regimes (The Republic by Plato). I haven’t yet read The Republic, but knowing it’s a banned book has just inched it further up my list of books to read.

There are books that I suspect I’ll find distasteful and therefore have no desire to read them (the books by Mark “Chopper” Read, who is an Australian gang member who wrote while he was in prison, for example). I don’t think the books should be banned, but I’m also happy to just choose not to read things that I think I won’t like. I did read A Clockwork Orange though. And that really is distasteful, quite horrible in fact, as is the film. But I’m really glad to have read it and seen it. I think it has merit as a literary and cinematic work, even though what it portrays is really rather unpleasant. Mind you, yet again, my opinions on the work are irrelevant.

In this increasingly authoritarian world, thinking, reading, writing are things we can still do, but are coming under threat. Thinking, reading, writing should not be prohibited behaviours. Self-censorship when writing is not a bad idea – it’s probably better if people didn’t deliberately try to offend others. Discretion in choosing what to read is not a bad idea – it’s probably better to not read something you think is going to upset you. But taking responsibility for your own actions and not blaming them on a book is important.

Books are powerful: not so dangerous that they should be banned; but powerful enough that they should be read.