Maybe it’s a stretch to ascribe purpose, but three events of the last 48 hours have set off harmonic vibrations and my ears are ringing.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, a friend and regular reader of my You Can’t Read That!<\/strong><\/a> posts forwarded a short story by K.J. Parker, “Burning Books for Pleasure and Profit<\/strong><\/a>,” about a dealer in incunabula who’s given a death sentence when he’s ordered to translate an ancient scroll, a dangerous document with the potential to undermine and destroy society’s religious foundations. Earlier that day I had started reading Paul McAuley’s novel “Beyond the Burn Line<\/strong><\/a>,” wherein an amateur archeologist, a member of the species of furry mammal which inherit the planet after we kill each other off, digs up forgotten human knowledge and technology. Then this morning I realized the next book in my queue of Kindle to-reads is “A Canticle for Leibowitz<\/strong><\/a>” by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a classic dystopian novel about cloistered monks who, hundreds of years from now, preserve the writings of a past civilization without understanding them.<\/p>\n It’s interesting that my new year should start off with three coincidental banned-bookish events. What am I getting from this convergence? A renewed sense of optimism with regard to the current wave of censorship and know-nothingism.\u00a0To censor is a basic human impulse. We always try to suppress the writings and ideas we fear. It is, at best, a temporary fix. If I may paraphrase, knowledge wants to be free.<\/p>\n Still, the suppression of books and ideas, while doomed in the long run, hurts individuals and societies in the short run … hello Dark Ages, hello post-Code Hollywood, hello school libraries all over the U.S. Support your local banned-book blogger!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Support your local banned-book blogger!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32438"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32445,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions\/32445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}