Read Across America Day was created to encourage children to read more, and it is celebrated on or near Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

If pressed about what my favorite Dr. Seuss book is, I will betray my un-PC roots and tell you that it is And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I’m an old crank, and this means that I refuse to change my answer even though the book has been canceled by the Seuss folks themselves. As a kid, I was way more interested in the animals than the Chinese guy, and I was way more tuned in to Marco’s imagination and the rhyming schemes than any cultural politics. (Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on this.)

The NEA made a very public fuss in 2017 about shifting the event “away from being a Seuss-centric March 2 event to its year-round focus on sharing books that celebrate our diverse nation of readers.” Times change, I get it. But the thing is, I suspect if Seuss were writing in today’s climate, his material would be right in line with that mission statement, and that’s part of why that particular culture war bothered me so much. Like the people making those decisions were so busy staring at one vein on one leaf of one tree that they canceled an entire forest of ideas they actually probably agreed with.

And now, not even a decade later, the NEA’s big push is to fight the “banning” of books. In theory, this sounds great. Who doesn’t oppose the banning of books? More reading is better, right? Unless it’s Mulberry Street, I guess—and that right there is I’m only slightly less annoyed by this movement: It has its own problems, the biggest of which is a seemingly intentional misuse of the word “ban” to get people worked up, and the second of which is that this movement appears highly selective in the materials it champions.

My husband and I have talked about this a lot, so my thoughts are reasonably well formed here. First of all, a book not being available in a school library is not a “ban.” There are lots of books missing from school libraries, for lots of reason—space, funding, and demand being big ones, way ahead of “the school board doesn’t like it.” Furthermore, even if you hide a value judgment behind a budgetary one, it’s still not really a ban if a kid can get their hands on that book somewhere else—the public library, eBay, friends, you name it. Sure, it might be harder for some kids to find some books, but in this world of the internet, interlibrary loans, and used book stores selling stuff for a dollar, lack of access is not the issue it used to be.

My bigger complaint about this particular topic is that the people making the most noise about it this week are every bit as selective as the ones they are fighting with. If you truly oppose censorship, then you can’t say everyone should have access to All Boys Aren’t Blue and then one breath later say that school libraries should not be circulating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I don’t know. We are all products of the times and households in which we live. I cut my teeth on Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street, and Dr. Demento. My kid inherited a lot of Dr. Seuss, but he also got Jon Scieszka, the Wiggles, and Gwen Stefani. Is that better? Or will some future “Cheese Counts” group or “BO Is Beautiful” movement cancel the guy my kid loved as a wee sprog?

That’s supposed to be the great thing about reading—it exposes you to entire worlds outside your own. You can read a book and form opinions. But you don’t even have to stop there! You can read what other people have written about the book you just read! And then you can read what still other people wrote about what the first group of people had to say. You can spend years in one rabbit hole on one book if you choose to do so. (Anyone who has seen the fantastic movie Metropolitan knows what I’m talking about. And anyone who hasn’t seen it should drop everything and go watch it right now. I don’t endorse reading Trilling without reading Austen, my point is simply that both are there for the taking.)

Honestly, I think maybe we don’t need a Read Across America Day so much as we need a Critical Thinking Across America Day. I suggest that this effort start with the folks in charge of the NEA.

The important part of reading is not the ingestion. It’s the absorption. In another great book that became a great movie, Reuben, Reuben, a character is all excited about speed reading and getting through War and Peace in under an hour. The dismayed response sticks with you: “But he read the book the way the fertilizer man reads reports; he did not read it as a book. I, for example, would like to read Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night’ as slowly as possible. In fact, I would pay vast sums for anyone to teach me to read the books I love at a snail’s pace.”

By all means, America, do keep reading. But please, read outside your comfort zone and then think about what that author is actually saying. You might just learn something.