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 the fact that this manifests in the form of £2,400 Dior tote bags emblazoned with the titles of French novels, I’ll leave the champagne uncorked for the time being.