Pushing Back Against Book Censorship

The banning of literature by civic and religious groups and government officials can have unintended consequences like arousing the public's interest in the banned books and potentially driving up their sales, thereby undermining the ban.

But despite that risk, there are still individuals and groups willing to remove books from classrooms and library shelves in an effort to control what others can read.

To push back against book censorship, the Columbia University Libraries, in conjunction with the New York Public Library, is conducting the 12th annual Morningside Lights The Open Book procession in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan. The participants will carry 50 plus handmade lanterns honoring various "Great Books," including, no doubt, books that have been banned or challenged as being inappropriate like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

The event, scheduled for Saturday, September 30, at 8 pm, is "a celebration of the free exchange of ideas," declares a flyer, "and an homage to the libraries that preserve access to knowledge and affirm our freedom to read."

The procession route begins inside Morningside Park at 116th Street and Morningside Avenue. The participants will proceed to the outside of the park, heading north and then west until it reaches its final destination, the campus of nearby Columbia University, probably gathering at the steps of Low Library.

Reminder: Banned Books Week is October 1-7, 2023.

Stay Curious!

"People ask me, 'Why are you interested in physics?' But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity."--Cormac McCarthy, American novelist (1933-2023), quoted in his New York Times obituary (June 14, 2023), from an interview that was published in Rolling Stone magazine in 2007.

Abraham Lincoln, Seeker Of Knowledge

As a lifelong reader and book lover, I can totally relate to young Abraham Lincoln's reading habits as cited in the following passage from Brian Kilmeade's The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, 2021):

"Whenever and wherever he [Lincoln] could, he read. He read in bed. He read sitting astride a log by a stream. One friend spotted him reading in the woods, lying on the ground with his legs extended upward along a tree trunk. He read while walking, so absorbed in his text that he would sometimes stop, oblivious to anything but the words on the page, before continuing on, never having lifted his gaze."