Books & Audiobooks
There is officially less than a month before the U.S. elections, and I’ve been reading a lot to make sense of what feels nonsensical. Democracy has been called many things, but I cannot remember a moment in my lifetime where the stakes of it felt so high. I never thought I would read the Canadian Constitution in the early hours before work, in earnest either. I’ve been searching for comfort amidst a feeling of powerlessness while watching the American election cycle from afar, given that the last one included an insurrection. My goal of reading 365-400 books this year notwithstanding, I’ve wondered (and tried to read about) what democracy is and what it means anymore. What is democracy’s “why”? And what does my job at a public library have to do with that?
I wanted to know how to answer the question “How do these documents we use to call ourselves a nation in Canada, protect our democracy? Are we all that different?” We live in a time of political extremes and are well into North America’s “alternative fact” era. Libraries are the epicentre of democracy. Akin to the metaphor of the Amazonian rainforest being the lungs of the Earth, public and academic libraries are the lungs of democracy. Access to knowledge without fear, and the free circulation of unmanipulated facts seems among the first things that typically disappear under authoritarian rule. A democratically engaged citizen is a knowledgeable citizen, and libraries educate at no cost. It is why funding for them is so important.
Did you know that with your library card you can get free access to newspapers that are otherwise behind a paywall on social media? You can read the New York Times, the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, as well as the National Post for free on PressReader with your Waterloo Public Library card.
The titles, Fascism: A Warning, and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; And How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, in addition to the Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism all provided useful signposts to understanding how authoritarian ends produce antidemocratic means. The most impactful however, was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which clarified the machinery necessitating her era’s promise and multi-generational refrain of “never again”. They lent themselves well to cautionary tales for the United States, but I kept wondering about Canada.
What does democracy mean when access to campaign funding limits candidates, while boosting others, as outlined in Dark Money? How can we reconcile public office as democratic when Canada has its own billionaire and super rich class that, according to Plutocrats, Thieves of Bay Street, and The Sport and Prey of Capitalists may not shape elections directly, but may wield an outsized influence that leave many behind? How do libraries matter amidst this multifaceted chasm?
These are the questions I’ve been troubled by, and that I’ve brought with me during runs, considered carefully when creating programs, made sure I tarried with while refilling book displays, and tried to outskate at the rink during my downtime. I’ve sat with my coffee in the mornings too, contemplating these issues to ensure my “why” is substantial enough to hold up the ceiling of my best intentions to mirror the space beneath which the stacks at work sit in what Canadian novelist Susana Kearsley once noted as being the last space where people can gather without the expectation of spending money aside from hospitals. It is where people have faith in ideas and transact in them for the inflation-resistant and low cost of free, every day.
I invite customers to read not only the books mentioned in this post, but others too (and to recommend them to us!), to learn more about democracy, democratic institutions and why your voice matters in Waterloo and beyond. Where libraries provide communities with facts, I felt it important to preface the next handful of books I’ll be reviewing here with this post because they are political, and for many, that can be the furthest thing from the safe apolitical space that libraries provide. I’ve read and will be sharing reviews for books that have helped assuage my nerves, restore trust in politicians (and some systems), and ease anxiety by meeting fears with facts. Which is another of my favorite library “whys”: libraries fight fake news. As we continue navigating the alternative fact nature of this era, I am reminded of the importance of sharing books that bring people together under the banner of the common and timeless good of knowledge.