What I’ve learned after 100 meetings of the Velshi Banned Book Club

A few chapters into Margaret Atwood’s magnum opus “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the protagonist recalls watching a group of people standing in the winter air lighting books and magazines on fire. It is a memory from before, when the America in the book was teetering on the edge of patriarchal theocratic rule. The reader already knows what is coming, but that doesn’t dull the danger.

The “Velshi Banned Book Club” has been featuring literature like “The Handmaid’s Tale” for nearly 2.5 years. This weekend will mark our 100th meeting. Every single author we interview and work of literature we profile — from universally beloved classics to contemporary, buzzy novels — serves to highlight this intensely scary moment. Every act of censorship, every attempted removal, and every ban is a flashing red warning sign we can’t ignore. 

Censorship efforts are getting worse. PEN America, a nonprofit that supports free speech, has been collecting data on book banning and censorship for decades. According to PEN, there were over 10,000 books removed or challenged from public schools in the past school year. According to reporting from various news outlets, including The New York Times, many of those book bans are occurring in states, like Iowa, Utah and Florida, where new laws support overt censorship. Many of these lawmakers have aligned themselves with so-called parental rights groups that advocate for restricting books lest children stumble upon something “inappropriate.”

The problem is, of course, that such legislation leaves what is and isn’t appropriate intentionally vague. And what ends up falling into the “inappropriate” category, again and again, are books that explore LGBTQ+ identity, what it means to be Black in America today, and women’s sexuality. And that includes novels that grapple with the realities of sexual assault and rape. These are the topics that are disproportionately banned and targeted every single day. 10,000 times in the past school year. 

And when you’re a reader who is Black, or queer, or dealing with the trauma of sexual assault, removing a book that speaks to your experience signals your story doesn’t deserve to be told.   

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The goal isn’t to hand every kindergartener a copy of “Lolita” and leave it at that. That’s obviously ridiculous, and ignores the way young people actually read. It also grossly undermines the importance of freedom of speech. It should be up to you, your family and your children to decide what is appropriate and when it is appropriate. These are not decisions that should be delegated to groups of lawmakers, select power-hungry parents, or far-right advocacy groups. Censoring books isn’t better for so-called parental rights, it isn’t pro-family, and it certainly isn’t pro-democracy.

Every week, members of our book club write in (and please do write to us at mystory@velshi.com) and ask what can be done. The answer is read. When you borrow a book from your local library, support your local bookshop and interact with your local school board, you are actively and directly resisting the systematic elimination of these books and the degradation of your freedom.

Literature contributes, in no short order, to the cultural fabric of our nation. There is something in the pages of each of these novels that is so important, so threatening, that the only solution is to take them away. Find out what it is. Read as resistance. Don’t ignore the warning.