Dua Lipa is a singer and songwriter based in London, and now she has propped up a library. I think that’s great. The world needs more book-peddlers, and everyone should read more books.
Lipa is marketing her library as a repository of “banned books,” which sounds transgressive and edgy until you see her list.
Out of these 100 books, about 15 of them were required reading for me in middle school and high school.
And Lipa is advertising her collection by holding up a copy of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.
Far from banned, this book and its cinematic adaptations have been almost impossible to avoid for the last decade, especially since Donald Trump rose to prominence and unhinged commentators decided that he was imposing a theocracy or something.
My brother John made a similar point on social media:
In what sense is this book, or any of Dua Lipa’s books, “banned”? One of my brother’s interlocutors provided the evidence.
Indeed, Atwood will tell you the same thing.
Madison County is a tiny rural county in Virginia, population of 14,000. The county, of course, did not ban A Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, the public library (again, in a county with only 14,000 people in it) carries A Handmaid’s Tale, along with nine other Atwood novels, plus her memoirs.
When the county government buys your book and lends it out to readers, your book is not banned there.
What Atwood and media dullards mean when they claim a book is “banned” is that someone, somewhere, has decided against carrying the book on his or her shelves. Specifically, Madison County Public Schools decided not to carry A Handmaid’s Tale in its public school libraries on the grounds it was too sexually explicit.
I don’t know if the book is too sexually explicit for teenagers (I’ve never read it), and maybe I would have made a different decision were I on the school board. Still, I appreciate this definition of a book ban.
If this is Dua Lipa’s criteria for a banned book, then I have some suggestions for other books she should carry. Here are words written on the wall of her library: “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed.”
I channel that spirit and use this criterion for “books that have disappeared”: Books not carried by her home public library system — the London Public Library.
The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray
This was one of the most controversial books of the late 20th century. You want courage? Murray was turned into a pariah for writing this book, which laid out the correlation between IQ and outcomes in modern life. The book argued that a “cognitive elite” was rising to power in the U.S. and the rest of the West. Talk about conversations that make the powerful uncomfortable! And the London Public Library refuses to carry this book.
Irreversible Damage, By Abigail Shrier
Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, which spurred a campaign to kick his podcast from the Spotify platform.
Amazon banned advertising for the book. Amazon employees demanded the bookseller simply stop selling the book, some quit in protest. At least one professor called for a book burning. A top attorney at the ACLU called for banning books.
Far more than any book on Dua Lipa’s list, this is a book that folks tried to keep you from reading, and it’s on one of the most important topics of our day.
When Harry Became Sally, by Ryan T. Anderson
Why two books about transgenderism? Because the transgender activists are the most censorious people in the U.S. these days. The censors actually succeeded in getting Amazon to drop Anderson’s book! Amazon refused to sell it for four entire years.
The London Public Library still doesn’t carry it.
PELOSI’S DEMOCRATS AGAINST DEMOCRACY
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than it Needs to Be, by me.
Family Unfriendly was published by Harper Collins, a major New York publisher, with a very positive review in the premier literary reviewer Kirkus. Yet the book never got reviewed by major newspapers or prestige magazines, my own local library initially refused to carry it, and the London Public Library, despite carrying my earlier book, doesn’t carry Family Unfriendly. Maybe it’s because it’s unpopular to say that marriage and baby-making are good, and we’d be better off if people did more of it. Heck, I even defend stay-at-home moms in the book.
Anyone who wants to challenge the powerful and the status quo should read my book.