Ban This Piece

And burn your computer while you're at it.​

By Zach Hively

Young people just don’t read anymore. This must be truth, because I work in the book industry, and I hear it from plenty of older people who

​a) monopolize my time at bookselling tables to tell me that
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b) they know exactly what young people do with their spare time.

They then proceed to walk away from me without buying any of the books I’m selling.

I cannot promise that these older people are the same older people who gape at younger people who admit they don’t own televisions and microwaves. But I can promise that they are the same old people who drove the young people off Facebook fifteen years ago.

Granted, there are solid cases to be made for the decline of reading. Take me, for instance.

Me getting published anywhere at all on a regular basis (such as this very Abiquiú News) suggests heavily that no one reads anymore, regardless of age. Unless it’s the birds and the gerbils whose cages get lined by my work, printed and shredded. Many more people, I am certain, light their woodstove fires with my work than actually read any single piece from start to middle.

My magnum opus, bottom right.

But I am just one man. I can produce only so much writing—as much as half a man, or perhaps a quarter of one. There are dozens more people like me out there, so-called writers, each of us struggling to craft the perfect cup of tea. Some of them are actually succeeding in writing back-cover copy for other people’s books well enough to get them banned. Banned, I tell you! And by people you KNOW don’t read.
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Now I can’t articulate exactly why it is okay to start a fire with the newspapers who print the junk I write, but abominable to start a fire with a book that also contains the junk I write. Nor can I explain why burning a book is worse than banning it, because it isn’t, other than in a matter of degrees. (Most bannings, for instance, take place at room temperature.)

All I know is that if I can’t stop people from condemning books to the ol’ burn-n-ban, dammit, I want them to condemn my work too. Because that is the SUREST way to get someone to read it. Or at least to buy it—can’t burn it if you don’t got it.

Frankly, I can’t figure out why I haven’t had more books banned, aside from the fact that I haven’t written very many. I like to say things that book-banners wouldn’t like very much. I am always game to “punch up,” as comedy experts say—to take a swing at The Man, the powers-that-be, particularly if I think they are unlikely to read it.

But I often refrain from punching anyone, old or young, up or down, because against all odds I have some remaining faith in humanity.

I was recently in attendance at a party for adults, in honor of a kid’s ninth birthday. I hung out with the kid, mostly because they have Legos, but also because I unwittingly made a day-long commitment when I asked what they’ve been reading.

I learned—in greater detail than the original text—about their current favorite book series, which I’m pretty certain involved a kid and most definitely dragons and the kid had bullies and also sisters (which were maybe the same people) and these other people also had dragons who weren’t allowed in the apartment complex which was a problem because CLEARLY you cannot keep your dragons OUTDOORS, especially on a day like THIS, and you don’t even understand how cool the main character’s clothing is, which she makes herself with the dragon’s keen fashion sense guiding her, but the other dragons don’t appreciate the chic bent to apartment D-3, so they bond together to wipe out both the main character and her dragon, and it’s possible the lines bled between the book series and the Lego village we were touring together while enduring the synopsis, but you get the gist and also I evaded adult conversations about the stock market so it was a real win-win.

​Oh, and also, on an entirely different day, I carpooled with a younger person who was very, very excited that he had just scored a box set of Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (which he explained was known as Remembrance of Things Past in an earlier English translation). He did not have Legos in the car with him, so that’s all I recall him telling me.

These: these younger people provide me with my greatest hopes for the future. I’m pretty certain we’re all going to die in an overheated, ever-erratic climate like that time I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the oven in my new rental house which also did not have air conditioning. But until that happens, kids and other younger people will keep reading, and bookstore sales will continue to climb so long as we have trees to make books and zealots to spike sales by banning them. I just hope some of the books are mine.