The World According to Henry: A Guide to Book Burning

–by Henry Huang

Suppose someday you and your friends end up in a situation like the one in the movie The Day After Tomorrow where you’re trapped in a library while a blizzard rages outside. In order to survive, you have to burn books to keep warm. Now the question, which books would you burn?
Remember, you are trapped in a library–an institution intended to store knowledge. You can’t burn books that will influence the survival and advancement of human beings. So, forget the calculus books, agricultural pieces, and books of essential scientific discovery. They are so important that it is not worth burning them to save individual life.
So what should you burn?
I suggest your first category for burning be . . . Celebrity Biography. Don’t get me wrong; some biographies are good. However, some biographies like Kim Kardashian’s Selfish, which contains nothing but her selfies, should be burned. Mostly, a biography exists because it can inspire people. However, Celebrity Biographies often offer very little under the cover. Do we really need selfies of Kim Kardashian? Remember, in our hypothetical situation, we are in a severe winter snowstorm, and we need to warm ourselves to fend off freezing. Those Celebrity Biographies are usually heavy (in weight), usually more than three hundred pages. Just one burning copy could keep us warm for hours.
Next, burn anything about the zodiac. I know many people believe in the zodiac and fortune telling. However, think about it seriously. We are now in a huge huge crisis that involves the existence of human beings in a snowstorm. At this moment, all kinds of zodiac and fortune-telling things would not work anymore. The only thing that we need to focus on, at this moment, is survival. If you’re about to freeze to death, do you really need your fortune told?
These are two kinds of books that I would like to burn in this scenario. What is your choice of books for burning in a life-threatening snowstorm?

Henry floated a survey on “What Book What You Burn” on Facebook. Here are some of the replies . . . .

Many of the respondents believe that the first choice of books for burning should be the Twilight series. The reasons were mostly concentrated on the fact that Twilight is a poorly written book. According to one respondent, “Twilight promotes abusive relationships and is just bad literature in general.” The second most popular choice involves encyclopedias and dictionaries. The reasons are, “They have the most paper, so they have the most fuel”; “They are very big and fairly replaceable.” Surprisingly, the third most popular choice for burning for warmth and survival is the Bible. The reasons include more are available “in the future” and “the Bible is thick and burnable.” And, one of Henry’s personal favorite responses is “Burn Mein Kampf.”