Harry Potter is currently sitting on my nightstand, accompanied by Leo Strauss and Karl Marx. But, yeah, that reading material really doesn’t make me some sort of Marxist, Straussian boy-magician.
And while that might sound strange to a certain Boston bookstore clerk who recently achieved a bit of viral fame, it’s worth noting that one of the main points of reading is largely to confront, not confirm, individual biases.
Douglas Koziol, the bookseller in question, disagrees. In a self-important essay published on the website The Millions, he argues that literary vendors have a higher responsibility than sales. Though no book burner, Koziol suggests that steering customers away from certain titles is somehow acceptable.
A liberal literary hipster, Koziol thinks J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is particularly loathsome. It’s a book that he finds not only “objectionable” but also “actually dangerous in the lessons it portends.” It’s as insidious, he says, as Atlas Shrugged or the Bible, books dedicated oddly enough to radical individualism and radical altruism respectively.
But for a man who apparently reads a lot, he’s oddly ignorant. The mere purchase of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t amount to an endorsement.
One reader can come to the conclusion that Vance is an opportunistic, virtue-signaling voyeur who paints with an overly broad brush. Another reader can come to the conclusion that flyover country is populated by knuckle-dragging idiots. And a third reader can even come to the conclusion that Vance should run for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
Either way, the goal of reading is to engage seriously with authors’ ideas. Even the most casual fan of “Reading Rainbow” knows this. You take a look inside a book to broaden horizons, not to absorb ideology unwittingly through osmosis.
That’s what makes Koziol’s essay so troubling. He exhibits the sort of intolerance that defines the worst corners of the Internet today. He wants the pages between book covers to be a safe space. More of a literary nanny than an actual censor, he sees his job as protecting the delicate psyche of his customers.
A better book clerk would instead stock the best books and let the customer select the best titles. Free inquiry is both a societal good and good business. A presumptuous lecture about reading lists from a censorious cashier will do more to send customers to Amazon than any blockbuster Prime deal could.
Turns out, we are not necessarily what we read. And reading Hillbilly Elegy is about as likely to make someone a Republican as reading Harry Potter is to make someone a wizard.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
