Recent MAGA attempts to ban books in schools focuses on repressing the stories of gay and trans kids and rewriting American history to leave out the bad parts like enslavement, segregation, and racist violence.
These book-banning efforts are part of the War On Reading, designed to keep citizens ignorant, suppress progress, and contain the power of literature to critique the state.
But a small cadre of teachers at Public School Zero has an alternative set of book bans to propose with a different end: the promotion of Reading as Self-Care.
Ban Books With Ugly Covers
There is no excuse for books with ugly covers. In this day and age, anyone can use free online tools to design a nice cover. If your neighbor with the ferrets can do it for his ferret-based self-published Amazon book series, then your textbook publisher with a fortune in our tax dollars can do it too.
Why do books have ugly covers? Is it just a failure to care? A criminal lack of creativity?
No. Ugly books are also part of the War on Reading. Ugly school books are designed to destroy the pleasure of reading. When a book looks like a technical manual on air conditioner repair for the 1980’s you know, it is not an object of desire (like a beautifully designed iPhone) but rather an instrument of intellectual torture.
The ugly book cover is also part of planned obsolesce in the textbook industry. When a book becomes too ugly and dated, richer schools replace it even if the contents remain relevant. I feel sorry for the landfill that must accept the 10th Edition of American History and Me with its creepy clipart cartoon cover of Betsy Ross.
Refuse ugly book covers!
Ban All Boring Books
Children are learning that reading is a form of punishment and a mechanism of control rather than an act of joy. The intentional deadening of the pleasure of reading is part of the anesthetization of the citizenship designed to inure them to their subjection.
It begins with pathologically boring early reader books with violently uninteresting characters, plots, and settings. Do we care if Matt sits on a chair? No! Would we be interested if Matt put a roll of tape in a jar of peanut butter? Yes!
The next insult to entertainment is the preachy didactic books about how Mary is a Very Good Girl and Does Just What Authorities Want Her To Do. How about Mary says she is sick of being a pleaser and refuses to hug letchy old men?
Then come the textbooks with the Tariff Wars and Battle Dates. The dirty bits and the dark bits that have been excised are the only parts worth remembering. But the American history textbook is not designed to be remembered. The American history textbook is designed to make us forget the past so the same crimes can be committed over and over against us.
Ban Novels Where The Characters All Have Similar Sounding Names
Exceptions will be made for historic novels, but no new novels should be published with confusing character names. At the very least, the main characters should have names that begin with different letters and that don’t rhyme or contain matching syllables.
When the characters are hard to tell apart, it interrupts the easy skimming through the boring parts and is sure to catch you out on the quiz. But most of all, it makes it hard to have fun reading the book.
A hefty fine, to go to the Not Ugly Book Cover Designer’s Fund, should be charged to all offenders.
Ban Reading Questions At The End of Books
If ChatGPT can write the answer to your incredibly boring questions, then you should not be asking them. Please don’t make me contrast, compare, reflect or list anything.
The nature of reading is immersive. You leave the world of your online bully and your angry stepmother to enter the other planet of whatever. It is a virtual experience of another reality that is destroyed by your petty quizzes and reader’s guides.
For reading to work as self-care, the magic must be preserved. Stultifying reading questions that force you into a public performance of what should be a private act are like murdering your imaginary friend.
That’s why the punishment for reading questions should be death.
Reading Questions
- Who is creeping on Mary?
- How is school an instrument of capitalist control?
- What were you thinking before your mind was hijacked by these questions?
Also Read: Reading As Self-Care