About book bans

Nobody likes the idea of banning books, or restricting their circulation, but it’s never that straightforward, is it? I don’t think I’d be much perturbed if my local library chose not to make available volumes celebrating global jihad, or denying the Holocaust had ever happened; or if my nearest Waterstone’s refused to stock hagiographies of Stalin or Pol Pot or even Andrew Tate. And if the books in question are intended to be read by young people, it’s understandable that literary gatekeepers, well, keep those gates.

That said, there seems to be a tendency within school libraries in the UK in which, to put it charitably, the watchword is excess caution. See, for example, the case of a school in Greater Manchester, where the removal of a book about (not endorsing) incel culture spiralled into bans on, among others, The Da Vinci Code, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, White Teeth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Girl Who Played With Fire, a graphic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and works by Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, Robert Ludlum, Margaret Atwood and, er, Britney Spears. What the hell was going on?

Well, two things. One, inevitably, was that the list of inappropriate texts was concocted with the help of AI. Effectively, whoever ultimately wielded the axe was too stupid and/or lazy to actually read the purportedly dangerous books. The other is that one of the criteria for removal was that a book was “not written for children”. Which (apart from the fact that it would exclude most texts on the GCSE syllabus) suggests that the school’s policy went beyond censorship to a form of infantilisation, protecting young minds from anything even remotely challenging to emotion or intellect. In an environment where only a third of people between 8 and 18 say they read for pleasure, that’s little short of cultural vandalism. Which does raise the question – what do these people think schools are ultimately for?

PS: In slightly more cheerful news, it seems that reading is cool again, even among the much-maligned Gen Z. Although, since this manifests in the form of £2,400 Dior tote bags emblazoned with the titles of French novels, I won’t pop the champagne just yet.

About the future

It is inevitable that the most perceptive prediction about the near future I’ve seen so far this year comes in the form of a meme. It’s also appropriate that I have no idea who created it, and rather piquant that, partly because of the technological and social changes it implies, hardly anyone under the age of 45 will get the joke.

About unread books

A number of celebrated authors have offered their support, if not their creative juices, to a book called Don’t Steal This Book, intended to highlight the way AI technology rips off the work of published authors with nary a by your leave. Beyond the names of the not-writers, the pages are blank, so I assume anyone who buys it will immediately ignore it, just as I did with the empty poetry book Release the Sausages, a passive-aggressive squib targeting the timidity of Keir Starmer.

That said, books that sit passively on the shelf aren’t that unusual. The same trawl that offered up Charlotte Sometimes also netted me a copy of Ben Judah’s This is London. It was published in 2016, 10 years ago, but showed no evidence of ever being opened, let alone read, during that decade. In fact, the only interruption to its boxfresh perfection was a receipt, suggesting that its previous owner had picked it up in a different charity shop in 2018. So two separate owners had bought it and then callously ignored it. And now I’m looking warily at my own shelves and wondering what I’ll discover.

PS: From the Judah book. Pawel escaped Poland in 1981 and ended up as a builder in London:

“You know what it was like then? Back in the eighties, the nineties, when I was first building, your painter, he would’ve come from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts... You’d tell him to rip off the wallpaper and throw on three thick coats of paint and he would just begin telling you about Polish minimalism. Your bricklayer... He would be a sociologist, talking Hayek when it was tea break.”

About Charlotte Sometimes

Another World Book Day passes, which means – apart from the inevitable sprawl of kids going to school dressed as characters from books their parents pretend to have read – much soul-searching about the decline of literacy. There is much fretting on Radio 4, where the few remaining readers are assumed to lurk, as they repeat December’s podcast on the crisis, in turn based on James Marriott’s Substacked Jeremiad from a few months before that (and the irony that the participants are expressing their qualms via media that is at least in part to blame for the situation is not lost on anyone).

Elsewhere, though, Auntie is gung-ho in demonstrating that books are just as much fun as TikTok, kids, and not boring at all, appending a couple of Gladiators to the 500 Words writing competition and allowing the comedian Russell Kane to explain his adoration for Evelyn Waugh (which I share, of course) by reference to 90s raves and 21st-century social media, rather than just letting the old git be funny in his own right, in his own time, in his own very un-sweet way.

This sense of inclusivity is new on the block, it seems. At the weekend I picked up a 1970s Puffin edition of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, one of those childhood classics I know only by reputation (and then mainly thanks to The Cure). And inside I find the stark, defiantly exclusive announcement: “You need an alert and imaginative mind to read and enjoy this book.” And if you aren’t blessed with one of those, I guess you should just stick to watching Gladiators.

About Cosmic John

I found this in a forum on, of all things, a climbing site, where the conversation had for some reason turned to Radiohead, about which I once wrote a book. And it’s a fair question. Two of them, in fact.

(Tries singing said questions in Thom Yorke’s voice.)