As we head into the last week before the end of summer, not the time the season ends, but our summer lives end, we will again face the seemingly never-ending battles over what books should be removed from our libraries from the politicians who claim they are for freedom who want to restrict our reading – and our thinking.
It almost 20 years since Azar Nafsi, now an exile here, wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, the story of a book club reading and discussing books in secret because the Iranian government didn’t and still doesn’t want women to have the freedom to read and think. She’s now written a new book, Reading Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.
The point of literature, she writes, is to disturb us. To stretch our imaginations into realms we would not travel otherwise. Books are more than comfort food, the light so-called beach reads. The point of reading is to create a republic of the imagination that transcends our national, religious, and political limits. It is an ultimate act of reedom.
Prayer for the Day
Offered visions of futures we cannot imagine,
We turn aside for fear of change,
Invited to dream of a world beyond our comprehension,
We shutter with the demands made upon us.
Move us beyond familiarity with the past, O Lord,
And unbolt the doors of our minds and hearts.
In the name of the One who opens us to all possibilities,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
But in democracies we don’t kill our opponents or put them in jail – or just ban their books as we are doing right now – what threatens us is our sleeping consciousness and our atrophy of feeling. . What imagination does, it awakens our senses, it awakens our consciousness.
Azar Nafsi, interview in World Literature Today
Readers are born free and they ought to remain free.
Vladimir Nabokov, writer (1899-1977)
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Paul in his Letter to the Romans, 12:2