A review by ohmage_resistance
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

 Yeah, this wasn't terrible, but I didn't get what I hoped out of it.

So I don't tend to like books that are are meta about how wonderful reading is (it comes across as being kinda cheesy to me), and that’s definitely what this book spend its time doing. It very much has r/books energy about censorship, which wasn't really ideal for me.  It didn't really cover censorship in a way I thought was interesting. Like, what’s the point of morality/obscenity laws? What about limiting political expression via censorship? You won’t find either of these explored in this book. Instead, the dystopian government is super into censorship because they just hate imagination for no apparent reason. This is not why censorship happens, so it ended up feeling like a bit of a strawman. It became: “censorship is bad, because it makes it harder for me to read books” rather than exploring the underlying causes of it and why it’s used as a political strategy, not to make booklovers’ lives worse just because. There were an entire small rebellion going on to save books from being burned, and guess what? They had no political beliefs besides imagination and books good so they shouldn’t be destroyed.  (I also read this author interview https://lithub.com/little-cash-lots-of-censorship-bothayna-al-essa-on-opening-a-bookstore-in-kuwait/ , which just reinforced my impression)

And like, maybe the author didn’t get too much into politics because that would mean that this book would be more likely to be censored itself (which probably explains the generic dystopia elements too, can’t make it too much like real life). So I really can’t blame her too much for that. But IDK, I ended up feeling like The Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a much stronger statement about censorship despite not really being about censorship because it’s about the politics that lead to the censorship and imprisonment of the author, if that makes sense. Where this book just felt a bit toothless. 

The setting was a generic dystopia like 1984 but like, with the government being really incompetent feeling? Which kind of undercuts the point of making them a looming unknown force. Without that sense of hopelessness of it being pretty much impossible to succeed against such a strong force, the lack of detail doesn't really serve a purpose and just feels like poor worldbuilding. You can write an incompetent dystopia (it often works as a satire), but it needs to have a bit more of a “oh my god, these people are so incompetent and power hungry that they’re going to kill us all” energy to it). This didn’t go either route, so it just felt generic. And then the generic dystopia vibes clash with the magical realism elements because while I can see a world where they work together, the setting needed a lot more fleshing out before it got that. (It didn't help that most of the magical realism references where references to other books/stories, which didn't really lend much thematic depth to this book.

I was hoping for at least a technology/internet angle, which would actually be a really interesting way to do something new as far stories about censorship. But Al-Assa had most technology being taken away by the government (so the setting felt way more like a generic dystopia). All digital books are lost in the cloud, so of course, all book smuggling had to be done with physical books, (USBs and physical hard drives apparently aren’t important). (But of course, physical books are more aesthetic than ebooks, so in a book so much about how great reading is, you have to use physical books, apparently). I also thought it would be interesting if it would go more into translations/language and how that can be used to add new dimensions to censorship but it didn't do that either. 

So this book was really into the power of not really books in general, but moreso classics (and by that I do mean multiple sorts of classics, including children’s books and speculative works, but it had to be classics). And alternately, self help books and romance books were seen as drivel that the censors would allow through (they’re so bad, eventually no one will read). It was also really pro deep reading analysis and anti surface reading. So I recognize that I might be alone in this, but yeah, I thought that was a bit obnoxious/pretentious feeling? Again, it was definitely giving r/books vibe. Like, we all know that type of person who throws shade at other people for not being real Readers because they don’t read enough classics or they read the wrong sort of book instead or read from more of a surface level emotional state rather than an analytical/deep one. I think this would have bothered me a bit less if I hadn’t watched a youtube video about appreciating the different ways people read in the middle of reading this book. And I get that maybe I’m being too harsh because this book is about censorship after all, but IDK, it’s not like only classics/literary works are censored? 

Yeah, I would say this book is more about loving reading and classics and it didn't really have much depth beyond that as far as I could tell.

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