The Paul Wells Show - Ira Wells on book banning

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Writer, professor and cousin-of-Paul Ira Wells was concerned about the rise of censorship coming from both sides of the political spectrum. So he wrote a book about it, diving into the history of people trying to control what you read. That book is called On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy. He talks to Paul about the personal incident that sent him down this path, how the censors justify their actions, new threats to books in the digital age, and much more. 

The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. Once you start looking around for books to get rid of, it's way too easy to keep going. It's a kind of symbolic violence. It's a kind of way of saying here's what's not tolerated in our community and we're not going to actually take any steps against purging the society of these people who we don't like but we will kick them out of the library. This week, Ira Wells on Banning Books. Everyone's doing it. Now it's time to count the cost.

Everyone's doing it. Now it's time to count the cost. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells show. I have for some time wondered what to do about the rise of Ira Wells. He teaches English literature at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. He's been writing more and more for newspapers and magazines and he's been writing books. His biography of the film director Norman Jewison was definitive and widely praised. He's also my cousin. Well, some kind of cousin. I've never been good at this stuff. He's from the Alberta Wellses. His dad was my dad's nephew, or his grandfather was my dad's brother, or both. So I've been hearing about Iris since he was a little kid. He's really smart, the Alberta Wellses would say, just like they used to say about me.

Anyway, he's got this new book out about book banning. It's called On Book Banning. It's published by Biblio Oasis, a smart indie publisher in Windsor, Ontario. And the more I read about this new book, the more I thought I'd want to let you know about it even if the author's name was Ira Smith. So I called up Ira Wells and we had this conversation. It's pretty remarkable. The people who take books off library shelves do it for a bunch of different reasons, often contradictory reasons, and they always insist that they're not banning anything. Because of course the books still exist somewhere, you just can't find them where you used to be able to find them. That's disturbing enough. And the reflex to make those books go away

has become way too widespread. So it's time to talk about it. Iro Wells, thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me. So let's crunch this. It's not a mere coincidence that both of our names are Wells. We're actually part of the same family. You are, I think I've got this right, Egbert Wells' grandson, which means your grandpa was my

dad's older brother. That's right. Okay. We are, I think we're first cousins once removed. And the other thing is you're born in 1981. That's right. I seemed to remember that my grandmother your great-grandmother thought great things about you But in fact, she passed away two years before you were born

so you just saw a good thing coming down the Yes, she just she foresaw that there would come a child Anyway things are working out pretty well. This is your fourth book Third third. Okay room to grow and Anyway, things are working out pretty well. This is your fourth book? Third. Third. Okay. Room to grow. And it follows a very successful biography of Norman Jewison, which you wrote for our

mutual friend Ken White over at Sutherland House. And now you have written a book for Dan Wells at Biblioasis, who is no relation to either of us. As far as I know. As far as I know. No relation. Okay. You're jumping right into the deep end here.

The title of the book is On Book Banning, and it could hardly be about a touchier, not really touchier subject, but a touchier bundle of subjects. What got you going, and what are you trying to say with this book? Yeah. but a touchier bundle of subjects. What got you going and what are you trying to say with this book? Yeah, so what got me going was an email that came from my kid's principal at their school, which called for parent volunteers to participate in something called a library audit. And I remember I was writing something at the time

about business speak and sort of the nonsense of business speak and how these Orwellian terms get thrown around. I was wondering what could library audit possibly mean? I'd been hearing about some of the book banning that had already been happening in Florida, which was big news. I just sort of wondered, is a library audit, is that what you call it when book banning comes to Toronto? I signed up for this parent volunteer

committee and the day came and we were invited to the library and we're sitting in those little tiny chairs and trying to feel dignified. The principal asked us to pick five books, more or less at random, off the shelf. Then we were given something called an equity toolkit. It was the TDSB equity toolkit. These yes or no questions. Maybe we can talk more about this in a minute. But we were asked to use this toolkit and review these five library books. And I only got through one, in fact, in the hour that I was given. And it very quickly became apparent to me that to do this to an entire library of books was an absolutely preposterous proposition. There's no way that you could possibly do this for a whole library. At one point, just as things were wrapping up, the principal said that she wished she

could just get rid of all the old books in the library. I was a bit taken aback by that. I thought she must have been joking. Or at least I hope she was joking, but the next fall, there was a story that came out of Peel Region in Mississauga, where it turned out that the Peel Board over that summer had undertaken an equity-based weeding process. And they had in fact removed thousands of library books from the shelves in Peel region. There's 259 schools in Peel region. They undertook this equity-based weeding process that was much more structured and categorical than the thing that I was involved with. But basically, there were two facts about this thing that I was really struck by. One is that the administrators there in Peel decided that

any book that was more than 15 years old would be pulled from the shelves. This was 2023. Anything written in 2008 published, I should say, in 2008 or before was gone. The second thing that just blew me away was that because those books were deemed harmful, they could not be donated to families or people who could have actually used these books. Instead, they were treated like toxic waste. They were just boxed up and sent off to recycling, supposedly, if they didn't just end up in the landfill.

So I was blown away and offended by this and that was the genesis of the book. Now, your book is, among other things, I mean, it's a very historical survey of attitudes towards literature going back almost for as long as there's been literature. And you spent a lot of time talking about book burning activities, for instance, during the time that Ron DeSantis has been governor of Florida, for instance.

I'm saying this because I sort of want to establish near the beginning of our conversation that you are not normally thought of as a right wing crusader against wokeism. I think that's fair to say about you, Ira. Yeah. So DeSantis is associated with book banning. Although I think to be fair, he picked up on something that was becoming popular in Florida that really started

with these parents' rights groups, right? Like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education and so on. DeSantis then leapt on it. It was very popular in Florida. And those groups are hostile to LGBTQ plus literature. They frame it as indoctrination. They think that it's harming the children,

that they need to get the pornography out of the schools. But what really struck me, Paul, was that the progressive educators in places like Peel region in Ontario, were using a similar kind of logic from the opposite perspective. But they also believed that books are harming children, insufficiently progressive books are on the shelves. And they

think of these things as contagion, right? They frame books and libraries as contagion, and that we need to save the children by banning the books. And that sort of logic informs both the left and right wing versions of this. And I was struck in the early pages of your book by its sort of careful and cautious tone, that you're sort of laying out, here's the situation, here's what's going on. But then you get to your own account of going through this TDSB equity toolkit to parse the suitability of a book called Sukis Kumono. And actually your tone doesn't change at all, but I became sort of progressively more horrified here because this is the recent past at the Toronto District School Board, an organization that I think does just a hell of a lot of fantastic work for over time,

millions of kids, and suddenly we're in this astonishing ideological hellscape as far as I'm concerned. Here are some of the questions. So you picked a book at random. It's called Sukis Kumono. It's about a Japanese girl who wears her ancestral dress on the first day of school. Then you are invited to test it against a bunch of questions. The first one is, does the text reflect students'

social identities, histories, and experiences? And your answer, in all fairness, is, boy, it's going to kind of depend on the student. And then the next question is, does the text build on students' experiences in ways that promote well-being and belonging? And your reaction was what? Is that it depends on the student.

You know, I live in Greectown, so there's still a heavy Greek presence in the neighborhood. Should books in my kid's library be evaluated according to the degree to which they affirm Greek identity? That's not my view. But this toolkit asks questions like, does it reflect students' lived experience? Does it silence certain groups?

Does it provide students with opportunities to challenge the status quo? I guess I had two problems with this, just to boil it down. The first is that it treats literature as propaganda by saying that literature is valuable insofar as it combats oppression. That's to make it instrumental to their political purpose. It's to say that these questions are designed to sort of reduce these children's books down to their political content and then judge that content as either for our side or against our side. And it's also to my mind just really presumptuous about why children read, about the assumptions that they're making, about what kids are interested in. I mean, obviously, so Paul, I should probably make one of those cautious statements and say that I'm, I'm for diversifying the library.

I'm all for children of all backgrounds being able to find themselves reflected in the library. But I think we also should be conscious of the fact that kids read for different reasons, right? Sometimes kids are into just wildly imaginative stuff that does not affirm or apparently affirm their identity, but that sets them free. So I think that we need to listen to the kids. It's striking kind of how narrow the hallways get when these choices are made. One of the books that was taken off of bookshelves in Florida that you mentioned

is a graphic novel called Drama about a kid in drama school and in drama class in high school. And I'm like, I gave that book to my daughter, Katie, for Christmas one year, and apparently she would not be permitted to take it out of a library in Florida, because the central character is, at least occasionally queer, and apparently one mustn't, one mustn't be permitted to see depictions of that sort of thing.

And then similarly, from this checklist, which invites people to consider the perspective beliefs and identities of the author, and so you were asked to consider the identities and beliefs of the author of Sukis Kimono, which you couldn't possibly have known what her beliefs are. I guess I was supposed to read her social media feeds or, I guess I was supposed to read your social media feeds or my guess is that the question behind the question there is, is the author appropriating an identity to which they are not permitted? I think that's really the reason why that question is on there is to give the censors

a chance to make a judgment call there. And I do think it's important to point out that this checklist, right, this TBSB checklist is a censorship tool. The Ontario School Library Association, by their own definition, says that selectors are looking for reasons to include books on the shelves, and censors are looking for reasons to exclude books from the shelves. And that's precisely what's happening here. So I think it's important that we call it censorship and we call it out. Because as you point out in almost every case, when pressed, people say that what they're doing sure isn't banning or censorship.

They're merely weeding or, um, yeah, you know, inviting a certain inviting, uh, emptiness on the shelves or whatever the hell the euphemism is. Exactly. But I think, yeah, you know, inviting a certain, inviting, uh, uh, emptiness on the shelves or whatever the hell the euphemism is. Exactly. But I think, uh, it's important to point out that these words do mean something to librarians and to the American library association to, you know, in Ontario, the Ontario school library association, they define weeding. The Ontario school library association defines censorship as the removal,

suppression or restricted circulation of material because they are morally objectionable, which is exactly what is happening here. According to their own definitions, they are censoring. And as to this category of weeding, which you mentioned a second ago, they claim we're not censoring, we're just weeding. Now weeding is a real thing. Library books fall apart, they get outdated. You don't need every single Guinness Book of World Records.

So weeding is the thing that libraries do. But again, it is not for controversial material. And the American Library Association is very clear. They say, well, weeding is essential to the collection development process. It should not be used as a deselection tool for controversial materials. They couldn't be clearer that this is not weeding

and people who are using, they're abusing the weeding process by invoking it in this way. Now, you're just inevitably going to get into judgment calls. Like at some point, there's too many books in this way. Now, you're just inevitably going to get into judgment calls. Like at some point, there's too many books in this library. We've got to get rid of four shelves worth of books. And the criteria are, by their nature,

going to be subjective. And I don't have a lot of problem with that. I don't have a lot of problem with a librarian deciding that a book is good. Yeah. You know, but these recent exercises are kind of sweeping. And you do mention the case of a young student in Peel region at Arendale School, a student of Japanese descent,

who kind of hopes that she wouldn't be the only student who'd read something about the internment camps in the Second World War. And in the library that she likes to hang out at, she notices that half the books are gone. The student is named, uh, Reina Takata. I assume she's probably in grade 12 now. I hope, I hope she's succeeding and doing well,

but she shows up after, um, the summer holiday. She's the kind of student that is familiar with her library. She shows up to, uh, to her library and that's where she eats lunch and she's, she's familiar with her library. She shows up to, uh, to her library and that's where she eats lunch and she's, she's familiar with the place and she shows up in September and the shelves are noticeably emptier. She estimates that they're like 50% emptier and this bothers her and, um,

she blows the whistle on it. And, uh, this was part of this equity based weeding process where in order to make the bookshelves more equitable, they weeded books on, for example, Japanese internment in Canada. They weeded Anne Frank, Diarra Van Frank. This is to make the library more equitable. And obviously, it's absurd. It's horribly presentist. Let's just say that. This idea that students shouldn't be engaging with history, that students can only – they should only be reading about things that happen within their lifetime. So much wrong with that. But also,

just from a publishing perspective, it's ridiculous to assume that the Canadian publishing, especially children's publishing, can replenish libraries at this rate. Every 15 years we can just have a whole brand new library. This is going to make us much more dependent on American stories and on American publishing to the great impoverishment of Canada and anyone who wants to know anything about our history. It's just mind-blowingly idiotic. To trivialize it, it reminds me of everything I don't like about lists of best new restaurants in a big city. The best new restaurants are the ones that haven't failed yet, and if you obsess with

them you're going to miss all the old restaurants. So you quote from this sort of manual that was used in Peel Region as a sort of guide for educators who were making these decisions, And I like to check footnotes, so I actually downloaded the manual from its source. And here's where it says about the question, like so some people say, well, but you're getting rid of all the classics. And here's what it says.

The category of classics typically consists of Eurocentric texts that were penned long before students' birth dates, and may not reflect the lived experiences of students within the Peel District School Board. Therefore, all texts within a collection must be thoroughly evaluated to determine whether they align with the weeding criteria,

with the aim of avoiding the reinforcement of colonial ideologies that are inherently racist, classist, heteronormative, and or sexist. that are inherently racist, classist, heteronormative and or sexist. Any thoughts on that chain of affirmations? So there's a lot wrong with that chain. And I hope that there are some, I trust that there are some librarians

who are listening to this and some teachers who are listening to this this because I think this is important stuff. I think that they should listen to Tana Hesse Coates, who in his most recent book, The Message, talks about how important it was for him to read Macbeth, talks about how when he was growing up in Baltimore, reading Macbeth allowed him to understand what he was seeing around him on the streets of Baltimore in a new way and to feel in many ways less alone and realize he was part of a larger human story. I can name a number of especially African-American thinkers. W.E.B. Du Bois was railing against this over a hundred years ago. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that what you've

outlined here, the idea that the classics are for white kids, essentially is what it's saying. It's a racist idea that's been around for a long time, that Aristotle and Socrates and all the rest, that's for the upper class elite, the scions of the Boston Brahmins and all the rest. They can deal with these big questions of the common good and, you know, individuality and the self and democracy and all the rest. And everybody else should just maybe think about vocational school or things like that. So it's a really impoverished idea. The teachers should challenge and they're being very presumptuous by assuming that marginalized

students need to see a certain kind of identity affirmed back to them in every case or else they can't engage with the text. That's just so demeaning to students. It's one of the first things I say to younger journalists who I'm trying to mentor, and surprisingly what I don't say to them is get out of journalism. But what I say is, read stuff from before your time. Read stuff from a moment when all the assumptions were different. So you can see how other people navigated different waters.

And I'm sad to hear it claimed that that is somehow an affront to their identity rather than a handy tool for them to find their identity. Yeah, I think that's right. And of course, it doesn't have to be an either or scenario, Paul. Obviously, a library is a place that can have all kinds of material that's up to date

and reflective of students' identities. And it can have stuff that's written by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison and people who were writing before 2008. We might find that African-American and marginalized students today also relate to that material. I want to take a moment to thank the people who support this show. Tackling the complexity of global challenges demands a different approach to public policy.

The Max Bell School of Public Policy's teaching, research, policy engagement, and public outreach develops the skills and understanding to solve the most important issues facing Canada and the world today. They offer several public lectures and conferences throughout the year on current policy conversations and provide an 11-month intensive master's program to prepare the next generation of policy leaders. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool. If I had to sum the book up, I would say in tone, it's kind of sad or wistful or mournful. Do you agree? Yeah, I wish it wasn't, but I'm a bit pessimistic, partly because I think this is part of a larger

devaluation of literature and books within our culture. Educators are, they say, decentering the book book from high school curriculum, which is to say that rather than asking students to read entire books, they read synopses or important quotes, snippets from them. And so I do think there's a devaluation. There's something called the American Time Use Survey, where they poll people of different ages, but how much time they spend doing any given thing. And apparently, students aged 15 to 19, or young people aged 15 to 19, spend nine minutes a day reading versus about four hours a day on their cell phones. So I think that we are witnessing a

generational turn away. I hope this turns out to be temporary, but I feel as though, you know, literacy is devalued, which of course raises the question of why, if young people today are reading less and less, why are their parents and administrators more and more concerned with banning books? And that's something I try to went back in on book manning. So what are some of your guesses? I mean, I've got, I think at some level, it has to do with a feeling of loss of control. Like almost none of us has any,

feels like we have any influence over what's going on in society. So those of us in positions of sort of moderate authority tend to clench up a bit more and try and control what can be controlled. There's no sense that a little chaos might be a good thing Yeah, I think that's right. I think it is all about control and a feeling that

The online world is so chaotic and so ephemeral, right? something is in your feed one one minute and it's gone the next and If you're upset about something that you see, where do you go? Where do you protest? Where do you register that discontent? Whereas the library is just such a handy, it's physical, it's there, right?

People tend to think about books as like the levers of social engineering, right? So I'll make the world a little less racist by taking Huck Finn off the shelf, or I'll fight wokeness by puttinguck Finn off the shelf or I'll fight wokeness by putting more Shakespeare on the shelf or whatever they think they're doing in Florida. Not that they're, that's a bad example.

But they think about books as little leavers of social engineering, I think. And I do think it speaks to a couple of things. One is it speaks to weirdly the enduring power of the book itself as a kind of symbol or as a kind of the book retains a kind of power even in a culture that devalues them in so many ways. Totalitarian regimes, the first thing they do is go after books and libraries and so on. But another point here that I would just quickly make is that I think that book banning is also a kind of symbolic violence. So whether it's the people in Florida or now Alberta, there was a big CBC expose recently in Alberta about closing down a library north of Edmonton.

But it's a kind of symbolic violence. It's a kind of way of saying, here's what's not tolerated in our community. And we're not going to actually take any steps against purging the society of these people who we don't like, but we will kick them out of the library. You're an academic. What are you teaching these days at the U of T? I teach a first year literature course. On that list, if you're interested, I teach Kazuo Ashiguro's Clara and the Sun. I teach a book by John Williams called Stoner. I teach some Lydia Davis short stories. I teach Jennifer Egan's Visit from the Goon Squad. And I teach a book by Suvank Kumbhavansa called

how to pronounce knife. That book stoner might be my favorite book that I've read in the last five years. And, uh, and it's about someone from kind of the middle of nowhere, who becomes an English teacher in university. Um, was it relevant to your experience? Funny you might ask. Um, I mean what I like about that book is that is that it's about falling in love with literature. I hope that by engaging with the story of this guy falling in love with literature, that many of my students who are coming from backgrounds where getting to come to the U of T

and do this entails significant sacrifice. Parents want them to go on to succeed, do well, and I don't begrudge that at all. Students are facing a precarious job market. They want employable skills. But I think that to give themselves permission to engage with literature for its own sake, not as something instrumental, not as like I'm going to read these sonnets because they're going to make me a better PR person or I'll learn political communications by reading my John Donne. But just to engage with it for its own sake, I think it's so liberating and students still thrive on this stuff. Nothing turns them on, Like, uh, at least some of them. Um, and, and my students are as good as they've ever been these days. I mean, there's a lot of

concern about, um, you know, chat GPT and, and our students doing the work and mine are, my students are awesome. That was actually a question I was going to ask is over the time that you've been in lecture halls has the engagement or the ability to handle complex arguments and texts been going in one direction or other among the students? Yeah, again, my students are as good as they've ever been. They are extraordinarily diverse. They're coming from all over the world.

But I think that they are engaging with literature maybe a little differently now because it is, and I think they pick up on this, that it's a little bit counter-cultural. They sense that the powers that be in their society want to keep them glued to their phones, want to keep that surveillance capitalism machine going. And students, I think, understand that there's a power in this 500- know, 500 year old technology and that every minute they spend with their nose in a book is, uh, is a little, you know, middle finger to, uh, to Elon and Mark Zuckerberg. And, um, there's something a bit counter-cultural about it now.

But the way to rebel is to bury your nose in a book that no one can take away from you. Exactly. It's not learning for me. It's not harvesting your information. You're in your own world and you're engaging with another consciousness. Do you have a sense of what's coming for you once you take on these organizations that want to do a lot of weeding in the name of decolonizing our classrooms? Do you, are you a little nervous? Uh, no, because I'm well versed in their own definitions and their own documents. It's all, as you pointed out in the footnotes, um, it's all rooted in, in

their own language and then their own commitments. Have you taken any guff on social media or stuff since the announcement that this book was coming? Nope. Okay. I wonder whether a fever has broken a little bit, whether things are not as bad now as they were when Twitter worked, when we were all in the midst of a COVID crisis, when Black Lives Matter was hot and urgent, and whether we're maybe a little bit better at talking to one another now than we were even a couple of years ago.

I hope so. Is that, I mean, you're much more involved in this space than me. Is that your perspective? I mean, the first thing I said was when Twitter worked. You know, it's really striking how hard it is to round up a mob these days because Everyone's not on the same social media networks the ones they used to be on a lot of people have left and Twitter is just a lousy

mechanism for Riling up your gang these days and plus I think people have noticed that Attempts to curate a perfect society, at best they don't really work. And too often they turn against the people who were trying to do the curating. So, I don't know, fingers crossed. Near the end of the book,

you offer some tentative suggestions for how to build a society that's a little bit less annoying than the one we're in right now. What do you have in mind? So I think that we need to dispense with the idea that we can just put everything online and that's going to solve all of our problems. I mean, I'm talking specifically about libraries here. I think that libraries have a lasting importance in ways that might sound somewhat quixotic or old fashioned, but there may have been a time in a more internet tech utopian moment where we might have thought that we could put everything online and that would increase accessibility and we could use

this great technology and the kids would read more and it would be so much more accessible. I think that there are some reasons to be very, very skeptical of that idea. One is that this model of subscription-based libraries, from the perspective of book banning, it's so easy just to hit unsubscribe or just to destroy a virtual library is for an autocrat or a totalitarian, an aspiring totalitarian, very easy to do comparatively than to physically round up and destroy every copy of a book. Moreover, I think that when you look at Freedom House publishes these internet freedom indexes, and the internet's a lot less free than you might think, right? I mean, something like 18 of the 75 countries that they look at actually have a free internet, right? So to what extent in a country like China or Iran or Russia or a number of others, is the internet actually

free and do we want to invest the intellectual infrastructure of our libraries? To what extent do we want to just simply trust that to the government of the day? So I think that libraries are going to have a place, especially physical libraries, they stand in opposition to the kind of ephemeral culture. And so I think that it's important to not buy the argument that just putting things online makes them safer. I think we've been given some very good reasons to be skeptical of that. It's interesting that it's harder to be sneaky about what you're doing to a printed book or to a room full of printed books. Whereas it's super easy to take the Kennedy Center website down for a morning and put it back up with a bunch of stuff missing, which incidentally happened this

week. Yeah, no, exactly. And I mean, in recent years, within the last couple of years, the Calgary public libraries had a cyber years, the Calgary Public Library has had a cyber attack, the Toronto Public Library has had a cyber attack. If we think that books and libraries are important, we need to ensure that the physical job of collecting that material and housing that material, that we keep going with that, because that's a project that is really essential to liberal democracy, I think. And it will come to haunt us if we just assume that the internet will take care of it. Have you by any chance reread Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in the last several years? That's one that I've been meaning to reread and I have recently read some Bradbury,

Martian Chronicles, but no, I haven't reread that one. Have you read it recently? Yeah, I mean, so I skipped it during, in school. I read about half of the books that were assigned to me in school because I was so busy reading what I wanted to read. So our youngest, Tom, got assigned to it in high school, which incidentally was during COVID. And so it was a lockdown project for me, was to catch up to it.

Of course, it's beautiful, but it also strikes me as a better dystopia than The more popular ones better than 1984 better than brave new world because it's about a future where The firemen come to burn the books not to stop the fires But the central characters boss says it's almost pointless Because the books lost their power when people stopped carrying what was in them But the central character's boss says it's almost pointless because the books lost their power when people stopped carrying what was in them.

And at the end, the little rebel group that survives an apocalypse at the end of the story are the ones who each take it as their mission to memorize one book so that the knowledge will be carried forward. The problem is that the book was published before 2008, so I don't know if it's appropriate for Peel Region libraries. We should probably be careful with that one.

I mean, did you have books when you were in junior high or high school, was there a book that like really meant a great deal to you? Different things at different times. I started up, I read an awful lot of science fiction and Stephen King books and things like that. It wasn't until I started to think I might wanna be a journalist that I started to think I should feed myself better.

And so the essays of George Orwell, a lot of short novels by John Steinbeck, Canary Row and Sweet Thursday, which is almost a throwaway sequel to Canary Row, really not a significant book, but one that I just thought was beautiful and had some things to say about romantic relationships that was, man, I needed some help on that.

And some stuff about structure that I swiped some ideas about structure from Sweet Thursday that I used in my big book about Stephen Harper. None of the romantic stuff made it into the Harper book. You never really know. How about you? Yeah. Also science fiction.

Uh, there was a book called, uh, Ender's Game that I think I read in, I don't know, grade seven or eight, and that, that really lodged, uh, you know, Robert Heinlein and, and Stephen King, Carrie. But of course, also, you know, know, if I were being honest, I would say that I cribbed books off my parents bookshelf because I thought there might be something dirty in them, right? Like I think I trudged through a Leonard Cohen novel once

just age after page of incomprehensible text, searching for those scenes. I'm being a big glib, but I think that there's, the important point here is that if you, if you treat books as just like an exercise in eating your vegetables, kids are gonna turn off reading. If there's something a little bit transgressive, a little bit naughty, a little bit dangerous, you know, kids respond.

Yeah. Your school principal, who I'm sure is, you know, has a big heart, but wishes she could throw out all the old books. Leave aside the damage from throwing out the old books, I wonder what good she thinks the new books will do. Like, I wonder what process the kids will go through if they read the correct literature.

It just seems an incredibly sort of sterile concept of things. Yeah, and I think the generous view of it, which I understand is this. Children should have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the pages of books, which I do believe. And I believe that we should trust and believe, especially kids from marginalized communities and queer kids,

LGBTQ kids, when they say that reading a certain book saved their life. And it's not hard to find people who will say something like that, that to see their identities reflected in some texts really saved them at a vulnerable moment. And I think we should listen to them. And I think we should believe that and ensure that our libraries have a huge diversity of books in them. But I think that it's wrong to just treat books as propaganda and to assume that you can socially engineer a more just society by forcing kids to read a certain thing. This is going to blow up. When kids are already, they're too smart. They pick up on it. They understand when they're being force-fed something and guess what? They react in the opposite way. This is another point about censorship. When you create a censorship apparatus,

for one thing, it just completely alienates the people who want to change their behavior. It then gets picked up and used by the other team, as we're seeing in the United States. but another, it then gets picked up and used by the other team, as we're seeing in the United States. But any sort of like toolkit that is, it'll just be picked up and the questions will be changed or the inflection of the questions will be changed, but it'll be just used to prune out all those books in due course.

So the answer is to reject censorship itself, not just to replace their censorship with our censorship. Yeah. I mean, it feels like we just got done living in a world where queer experience, BIPOC experience was targeted rather than promoted to the exclusion of anything else. And it feels like, especially given recent events in the United States, we're not clear enough of that danger

that we can forget that was ever there. Exactly. We're not clear enough of it. And I think that there's a lot to be learned from what's happening in the States right now. But pulling back from the excesses on both sides is something that I think in all of our best interests to do fairly promptly.

Okay. The book is called On Book Banning. It is part of the Field Notes series from Biblioasis, which publishes a lot of great stuff. And the author is my cousin Ira Wells. Thanks for joining me, Ira. First cousin once removed, Paul. I stand corrected. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show.

The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy. Thank you to the National Arts Centre for letting us record this interview in their studio. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Regehr is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show,

as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. you