On Book Banning by Ira Wells is a powerful addition to Biblioasis’s Field Notes series that focuses on provocative and timely topics. Like previous titles such as On Class by Deborah Dundas and On Property by Rinaldo Walcott, On Book Banning updates social issues and controversies that continue to impact our present moment.

Wells expands the contours of what counts as literary censorship in North America today. Through a blend of personal essay and in-depth research that allows for a comparison of the censorship debate in both Canadian and American contexts, Wells cautions us about the stakes of book banning: a loss of democratic and liberal values, “intellectual autonomy,” and a failure to understand why “reading imaginative literature matters.”

The full title – On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy – captures Wells’s argument about what constitutes “book banning” today: “library audits” to cull old works that harbour outdated and offensive views, books accused of “indoctrinating” students with LGBTQ+ ideas, and publishers pulling out of deals with authors who face cancellation.

Wells notes that “not all these phenomena constitute ‘banning’ per se, but they all fall under what might be called the new ‘censorship consensus’ in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.”

Wells discusses the political leanings implicit and explicit in several examples, such as right-leaning parents in Florida removing books such as Raina Telgemeier’s LGBTQ+ friendly graphic novel, Drama. Wells also reflects on his own experience as a parent who joined others to bring an “equity perspective” to books at his kids’ school using the Toronto District School Board Equity Toolkit. By pulling older books from shelves, he realized he was implicating himself “into a history of censorship that is as old as literacy itself.”

It is worth noting that such instances of “censorship” impact writers and books across the board. In December 2024, Lawrence Hill’s much-loved novel The Book of Negroes was dropped from the curriculum of the London District Catholic School Board due to its use of the n-word. Hill has also previously received threats about book burning and censorship, which he responded to in Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: An Anatomy of a Book Burning, his Kreisel Lecture given at the Centre for Literatures in Canada (published in 2013 by University of Alberta Press).

While Wells doesn’t address Hill’s experiences in the book, On Book Banning is a deeply relevant and nuanced book that challenges the implications of even our most well-intentioned initiatives, such as the administration of equity. Mounting his argument, Wells notes that “the progressive critique of ‘classic’ literature as ‘Eurocentric’ misses the mark. Classic texts now include literature from all over the world. But even texts from the European Renaissance, for instance, are always being reinterpreted in new, and often anti-colonial ways.”

Wells also touches on recent debates in Canadian literature. Citing tweets from a reader who chose to expunge Alice Munro’s works from their shelves after Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner came forward in summer 2024 about Munro’s complicity in the abuse she experienced, Wells notes, “We’ve long struggled with questions about how to frame the art of people who do things we abhor, but it was the lack of struggle that seemed noticeable in this case – at least among those who had decided that Munro’s work was now trash.”

Wells is by turns provocative and generous in his arguments about current forms of literary censorship, which “reduce literature to a shrunken, misshapen parody of itself. A novel teeming with voices and perspectives becomes a single ‘message,’ or a wicked idea, a naughty image, or even a single abominable word.”

What emerges in this deceptively slim and powerful volume is the voice of a devoted reader – On Book Banning is a testament to the life-altering power of books and ideas.