I Might Disagree With New College Tossing Books, But I Also Don't Want Them

I remember being a senior in high school and seeing a bunch of books at my school library ready for the dumpster. I got upset, and I took some of the books home. I don't think I kept them very long, but I'm not really sure, as my personal library has often been somewhere over 1000 books. In college at UW-Milwaukee, the English Department was tossing Shakespeare anthologies. I grabbed about a dozen, handing them out to anyone I knew who might want to read all of the plays. Needless to say, I didn't hand very many out. And when I was teaching English in Wisconsin, I would look through discarded books every year at my school library, often grabbing a few I thought my students might enjoy, and then also tossing most of them myself later.

Schools do have to weed out books. Some of us are book-lovers who want to save them, though we might not even want to read them. Recently, New College tossed some books. People got upset because it seemed to be politically motivated, and it probably was. However, I also don't want the books New College tossed. And I bet most of the people clamoring about it don't really want those books or own copies of those books. As someone who tends to sift through discarded books, I can say with confidence that most of those books probably needed to be weeded.

That said, if the New College library had space, why not leave the books, especially right now? I used an original 1871 copy of a book that the UWM library had when I was writing a paper for my French history class, and it was interesting to read what an author alive in Paris during the Commune of 1871 had to say about it then. I'm not saying LGBTQ+ rights are the same as a global political movement, but if I wanted to read about it 100 years from now, I suppose the only place that might have a copy of a particular perspective would be a large, diverse library. 

One type of literature that was popular when I was in college was confessional female tales of overcoming adversity (usually men). Frankly, I was annoyed by most of it, not because I'm a man, but because it wasn't very literary. What I mean is poor writing that was capitalizing on a subject having a moment. Like teen dramas about vampires. However, since it wasn't very good and meaningful to most people long-term, this type of literature (I assume) has mostly disappeared. Again, if someone wanted to read about Karens before they got loud, the best place to find these late-90s tales of womanhood would be a college library. 

I don't want to read all the books ever written, but I would like my kids to have the opportunity to read any stupid-ass book they want while in college. Mostly so I can mansplain to them why the book is wrong, but also because we should all be able to read whatever is out there while we try to figure ourselves out in college. It's not indoctrination. Indoctrination is NOT allowing people to read all books or see all perspectives. 

Anyhow, I still don't want any of the books from the New College library. They probably suck. But I will defend those authors' rights to create crappy literature.