On Book Burning and the Magic of Libraries

Diane Callahan
5 min readMar 28, 2020

If you had to choose one book to burn, which would it be and why? And would you even be able to light the match?

Most readers feel a gut-twisting moral repugnance toward the idea of burning books — and rightfully so. Even though it isn’t illegal, book burning often feels like an act of violence or a form of hate speech. It’s censorship in its most visceral form, and the villains of history…

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