The great chain of books – #6Degrees – how one book leads to another. There’s an explanation of how all this works here. Everyone is welcome to join in. This is my contribution for April 2025: Our collective starting point is Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024). It’s a memoir that begins with a harrowing account of the murderous…
Tag: J.K.Rowling
Burning the Books and their Authors
This tweet about toasting marshmallows on a fire stoked with Harry Potters brought to mind an odd incident from my childhood. To the amusement of the world, my home town decided to ban a classic of medieval Italian literature as obscene and pornographic. The year was 1954 and book was Boccaccio’s Decameron. Until that point only three people in the…

