The Walrus’ Ira Wells writes of the alarming trend of book banning that is happening in communities all across Canada:
My job now involves teaching novels and short stories to enthusiastic university students, many of whom are budding bibliophiles; at home, I’ve read aloud to my own children almost every night for more than a decade and will keep doing so until the audience dries up. Many of my friendships were initiated or solidified over the giving or receiving of books. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of these objects as self-evidently valuable. I had lost (if I ever really had) the arguments to explain why books matter and why the banning and destruction of literature is so odious and socially corrosive.
It’s time to revive and sharpen those arguments. Book censorship is on the rise. We’ve all seen the news stories—the frequent headlines about book banning in schools or public libraries, about the takeover of school boards, about novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation. Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.
Read the article here.
The Toronto Comic Jam 