People who don’t eat don’t get hungry. His job was to fill the bookstores with drivel. He had to make sure no one craved books. He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away. In the future, he and the other censors wouldn’t need to ban any books—no one would read them anyway. It was as if he
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