Buthaina Al Eissa

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The Book Censor’s Library

Lindsay

The most valued behavior was to mock what one was reading— whether the book was banned or permitted made no difference. What mattered was your ability to belittle the enemy.

Schools were designed to snuff out imagination.

He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away. In the future, he and the other censors wouldn’t need to ban any books— no one would read them anyway. It was as if he could see the future of humankind in a crystal ball.

HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING. THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE. THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.

proving that if you control a human being’s circumstances, you can drive their development in a certain direction.

“When the world is this abysmal, getting used to it is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

Time and again, he found himself pondering the government’s ability to create allegories and act as if they were real. And when his thoughts took him this far astray, he began to wonder if the government believed—even more than the opposition did—in the power of imagination.

BC Hark

If we all turned to thinking, what would be left for the government to do?

The Book Censor’s Library quotes

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