If a book has what I consider to be hateful content, I simply don't read it.

I'm very anti censorship in general, and I won't be ashamed of not extending that general rule to abuse guides and incitement to harm people when it comes to more nuanced specifics. You may want to defend books that give detailed instructions on how to hit a literal crawling baby so CPS can't prove it because you are more anti censorship than me, but ... I won't want to compete.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Nope. I think a lot of books are terrible, but “Laz couldn’t get through them” isn’t the same as “this should not exist.”

I’m an introvert but I enjoyed book club. You’ll meet all types and everyone will have a different perspective which is fascinating. I got to read different books from my normal preference so that expanded my horizon.

Someone is usually the lead and has a list of questions to let everyone take turns to share their thoughts.

Try your local library. Normally they have sales at least once a year. You may find some of the books there for a discounted price as long as you are good with "used" books. Some libraries also sell first edition books. These may be offered to "friends" of the library before the general public though. If these are books you have not read yet I would recommend getting them cheap first. After reading then you can decide which one one you want in a first edition and look for a good copy.

I'm part of a book club that meets at a bar, it's a pretty relaxed atmosphere. The book club president usually posts questions the day before or day of in our FB group, and at just about every meeting, there is one person who has not finished the book but comes by anyway to see what others think. A few times, I have had to lead book club and I have been the person who has not finished the book lol. Our group is usually small enough that everyone has a chance to answer each question, usually 4-6 questions, and the number of people varies from 2 to 12.

You'll be fine, but if your anxiety is pretty bad, maybe pull the facilitator aside and mention it, and ask that they not call on you for an answer if that's how they run things.

'I'm anti-censorship UNLESS...'

I usually find parts of a series that way and other parts of the series at later times. Depends on the series, though. Trashy YA like House of Night is relatively easy to find, I guess because people don't want to hold on to them. But very beloved series either don't get donated as much, and/or get picked up by other people very quickly.

For the stuff I don't find at those sales, I put it on my shopping list.

I keep track of the books I want to read by adding them to a shopping cart on my local bookstore’s website. Every few months I’ll purchase everything in the cart, usually around 20 books, and those will be on my TBR bookshelf while I take a few months to fill up the shopping cart again.

I like having a variety of books to choose from, and keeping about 20 books on my TBR shelf gives me options. If I lose interest in a book I’m reading I can just put it back on the shelf and pick up something else to read, returning to it when the time’s right.

"Protocols of the Elders of Zion" comes straight to mind

I don't know about burned, but if they go out of print and disappear from our collective memory I think we'd be all the better for it:

Anything Ayn Rand wrote. Her books are the perfect spawning point for selfish shitheads looking for excuses that justify them fucking other people over, and really don't have any merit. She's a shit writer, her metaphors are ham-fisted, oppositional ideas are always presented as the weakest straw-man version of such, and her "heroes" almost invariably wind up as misogynistic 1-dimensional fuck-ups painted as the peak of masculinity. I don't think we'd lose anything important, frankly given their history I think we'd be better off for it.

The only thing influenced by her that's worth anything is BioShock lol.

Did you read 1984? It’s also a theme in that book.

Farenheit 451, just for the lulz

This could seem un popular but I think at least one copy of every published book should be kept indefinitely for posterity. Anyone in the future can look back and see where the population is at.

If we can extend to the entire written word, I would unironically, mostly, at least for 99.9% of public access, would want the entirety of Twitter destroyed.

This is not because I think it corrupts the written word, or that I don't think attempts at literature on the medium have not been impressively artistic, or that I don't think it has seen effective use in mass organizing for good cause. But I think it also represents the worst of the past decade's internet in a couple key factors: 1) self-publication without self-scrutiny (and being serious about it instead of doing so on a s***posting forum); 2) poorly (or deliberately, but most likely just lazy) designed algorithms that encourage mob mentality by promoting outside traffic to the most heated polarized arguments and pile-ons; 3) no hysteresis combined with the two points above meaning the stupid stream-of-consciousness crap that a tween-to-twenties posts will follow them for life; and honestly it just goes on, but those are the big ones. Reformed algorithms can improve these issues to some degree, and they recently addressed/acknowledged the hysteresis problem a bit (or maybe just didn't want to keep buying hard drives), but it's still a crapville archive of the worst of internet mass socialization.

A lot of it is endemic to the problem that norms of social behavior on the internet are far behind those that have been established in irl society. I think burning down what someone once called the new Great Library (I feel like someone years ago called Twitter this, but I can't find it -- it's one of those things that was chuckled about at the time, but would be so beyond absurd to even mention now) would be a good symbol, like at the end of Fight Club (yeah, I was an edgy 90s kid and totally unique about it; how could you tell?) when they stuck it to creditors (but it wouldn't in reality do anything since there's several layers of backup records built in).

There are other sites (cough quora cough) that I think should be forcibly shut down but have the text archived for public use, but that's quite a bit different. In other cases I'd want additional legal options to norobots that expand, within reason, the rights of public crawling archiving for sites whose content and value is generated entirely by public users. Again, different, but it's effectively a total disruption of publishers, which if it were done to print publishing would be a chilling affront just like shutting down newspapers.

I'm surprised as well. I work in the antique industry and avoided this book like the plague because all the "collectibles" (plates, dolls, etc) annoyed me (I've never seen the movie). Finally one day I was desperate for a historical fiction and found the audio book for free on youtube, and oh my goodness! It quickly became a favorite. The narrator, Linda Stephen's, did an amazing job!

It will only be awkward if you act awkward, just be cool. They are always majority women but yeah act like it's no big deal and it won't be

Self publishing on Amazon has brought about so many people that have never even heard of an editor to paperback. Amazon should as least start a service where they can pay to have an editor review the books and recommend changes without taking a part of the copyright.

don't know why people don't talk about this book in The Greatest List, but by far this is my favorite. It took me on a whole journey and at end I was speaking like characters in this book.

“Mein Kempf” is probably the obvious example

Just bring really good snacks.

After a relative died I threw her Left Behind series on the burn pile rather than donate them. Eons ago in college I threw the Fountainhead against the wall. Only time I’ve ever done that.

To Train Up a Child. I have never found anything else (and I read smutfic, fanfic, smut, gore-gasm, etc. but that awful instruction manual of how to completely abuse (both physical and psychological /emotional; everything from advocating hitting your literal days old baby with a plastic ruler or flexible tubing, to gaslighting, manipulation, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, forcing forgiveness of abusers, and sexually repressing them to the point they’ll likely have to see a sex therapist before becoming intimate—even with their spouse after marriage) your child from literally the minute they come home from the hospital. It should be piled up and lit aflame, with the awful authors tied to a stake in the center. But otherwise, I don’t believe in banning, censorship, or book-burnings. But that awful book triggered in me some major flashbacks, and genuinely horrified me to the degree I genuinely believe it should not be allowed to be sold until relabeled as either fiction, true crime, or How Not to Treat Your Children.

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