BONUS | The Craziest Reasons Books Were Banned

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. When people hear about banned books, book banning, book bans, book banning, book bans, banning books, they have this perception of what that is. Right? They think it's going to be violent or grotesque or totally inappropriate or pornographic or they think the controversy is there for a reason, right? Which is what people who are banning books want you to think.

But in fact, most of the books that are on the ban or the challenged or the censored lists aren't what you would think at all, which is sort of the point. So I wanted to go through some books that have been banned historically, that have been challenged recently, that show just how ridiculous book banning actually is. Okay, so calendar of wisdom. Tolstoy actually thought this was his best book, more important than Mort and Peace or any of his novels.

It was a collection of ancient wisdom, spiritual wisdom, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Stoicism. It was him picking a handful of passages from all the different traditions to meditate on each day. Now you might not think that that's controversial and it isn't controversial here in America, but it was banned by the Soviets shortly after it came out and basically lost completely until 1989. Only then was it rediscovered.

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