The only time I remember being sent to "the quiet chair" in elementary school was for reading the wrong book. Everyone else was poring over a class reading assignment, which I had already finished. We didn't have dunce caps, but the spirit of them lived on in the quiet chair. I tend to think of that moment as when I first embraced transgressive reading habits. By the time I discovered Chuck Palahniuk's novels as a teen, there was no turning back.
"More than seven in 10 voters oppose attempts to remove books from public libraries, and that number crosses party lines," librarians Suzette Baker and Amanda Jones reported in a recent Time article, yet thousands of new bans are proposed every year anyway. We readers must stay vigilant and continually raise our voices, otherwise we risk a future where all but a few are "the wrong book" and any one of them could be grounds for punishment.