Today is the start of Banned Books Week, and I can’t think of a better way to observe this week than to read George Orwell’s 1984:
Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
Or, you could read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Catcher in the Rye. Lord of the Flies. The Color Purple. The Outsiders.
Any of the Harry Potter books. Any of the Goosebumps series. Or maybe Where’s Waldo?
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, all about a different kind of totalitarian society.
Or you could read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
Any of those would be good. They’re all frequently-challenged books.
Censorship is non-partisan. There are books challenged by liberals, books challenged by conservatives, books challenged by the ultra-religious and books challenged by atheists.
I generally like to read in a nice quiet place, but I like to read banned and challenged books as publicly as possible — poke my finger in the eye of the people who would like to make these books unavailable, so to speak. And say, as loudly and clearly as possible, thought is not a crime, and:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
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