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Gary Holtzman's avatar

As a teacher in a US state in which book banning (from the right) has become a real life concern, I am also deeply troubled by the pressure campaigns to pull books coming from the left. As you note, Goodreads has become a tool for this. I first noticed it last year with a YA book that didn't even have a publication date yet, so no one had read it, about a Jewish-American girl exploring her queer and Jewish identities on a summer trip to Israel. There were hundreds of one star reviews denouncing the book as Zionist propaganda. I wrote to Goodreads expressing concern about the treatment of this book, but also the wider issue of why people are allowed to leave "reviews" of books that no one has even read yet. One of the purposes of books is to inspire and provoke passionate discussion and debate, even protest. But people should at least have the option of reading them to make up their own minds.

Shutting down that possibility by pressuring authors to withdraw books before publication, in a world in which not long ago Salman Rushdie was literally stabbed on stage during a literary festival and many more people - especially women in the public eye - are subject to horrific campaigns of online abuse, doxing, and now even pornographic deepfakes - is simply another type of banning. But perhaps even more insidious, because these are books that won't get placed on defiant "Banned Book Month"-type tables in bookstores and libraries.

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Unset's avatar

This is not a tricky topic. The idea that one should not release a novel set in 40s Soviet Siberia because of the current war is utter lunacy.

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