Books: June 2005 Archives

After college I stopped going to the library. The reason was that I kept racking up fines because I wasn't very organized. A while back I returned to patronizing the library. There was a web interface for requesting books and I could get a notice in my inbox when the book was overdue. This was all very good news.

Unfortunately, I got a little busy and I ignored the emails. I ended up with $90 in fines. I keep telling myself it's a donation to a good cause. Considering the size of that fine they really ought to give me a "gold" library card.

Recently a panel of "conservative scholars and public policy leaders" compiled a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries".

This strikes me as absurd. Books are harmful now? Are we returning to the age of book burning?

Where are the conservatives who used to talk passionately about personal individual responsibility? In the case of the books espousing communism it is not the books that killed 100 million people in the last century, it was people like you and me who blindly followed orders of their rotten governments and murderous revolutionary leaders.

An amusing counter editorial sent to me by a co-worker pointed out that the bible and the koran should be on this kind of list. Without any question both of those books have been used to justify the killing and/or exploitation of people for many centuries, of course they don't fit into the 19th & 20th century requirement of the original list. The jokester writing the counter editorial is of course completely full of it in suggesting Hitler's book was the only book with a body count; don't forget communism kills.

If the books listed in the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" weren't mostly so bloated and tedious looking I would resolve to read them all out of spite.