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Welcome to the Sunday edition of Today in Books, where we recap the stories readers were most interested in this week.
New Study Finds That Book Bans Increase Readership of Inclusive Content
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and George Mason University have published a new study about the impact of book bans on the consumption of banned books, and the results might surprise you. Using book circulation data from a “large library content and services supplies to major public and academic libraries in the United States” about the top 25 most-banned titles, found that:
- Book bans increase the circulation of banned books by 12% compared to a control group. That is, book bans lead to a Streisand effect rather than having a chilling effect on readership.
- The effect spills over to states without bans and is only slighlty lower (11.2% increase).
- The increase in readership centers on books related to race, gender, and LGTBQ+ issues.
- Book bans expose new readers to inclusive content; on average, children read banned books 19% more than the control titles after a book banning event.
- Circulation of banned books increases in red states that have book bans and in blue states regardless of book ban status.
This Guy Has Listened to Gatsby on Repeat for 5 Years
In the early days of Covid, Andrew Clark started listening to a portion of the audiobook edition of The Great Gatsby narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal every night before bed. Setting a sleep timer for 45 minutes, he’d finish the book every week or so and start all over again. In 2024, he stopped using the timer and simply allowed the book to play in his ears all night. Now, he has listened to The Great Gatsby more than 200 times. Clark knows it’s a weird choice:
Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat?
But he doesn’t plan to quit anytime soon. Gatsby has become part of him, and his reflection on how his understanding of the novel has shifted with age, time, and repetition is quite lovely.
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