Written By David Gomez
Do you remember the first book you ever read? The first story, the first tale, the first novel. Our lives are made of stories, one after another. And books have always been the vessel that carries us across time, allowing us to dream, to live a different life, to forget our own reality while inhabiting the imagination of someone we may never meet. Books are more than objects filled with words; they are art imprinted through countless experiences—some imagined, others drawn from the raw truth of life itself.
My earliest memories of reading are intertwined with my grandmother. She was the one who helped me learn to read when I was around four or five. We would spend long afternoons together, lost in fables and fairytales while my parents worked. Aesop’s fables, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, Greek myths, and legends from distant places filled my childhood with wonder. I can still picture her voice rising and falling with the rhythm of each story, as though the world around us disappeared and only the tale remained.
As I grew older, my grandmother would tell me about great authors from around the world—names that I would later encounter again at university. Writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Dickens opened my mind to human complexity and moral depth. And, of course, the great Latin American writers also shaped not only my sense of identity but also my understanding of universal literature. You might expect me to name a Peruvian author, but the writer who truly changed my life was Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Laureate of 1982.
Books like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera revealed to me the soul of Latin America—its poetry, magic, and heartbreak. Through García Márquez, I saw my own life mirrored in his characters’ longing and resilience. That’s why it pained me deeply to learn that his books have been banned from schools and public libraries in several U.S. states, including Florida and Texas. They were accused of containing violent or inappropriate content for children. Such claims are not only absurd but dangerous—they distort the essence of literature and erase cultural identity. This is not about protecting children; it is about silencing voices.
Censorship is a form of control. It begins quietly, often under the pretence of morality or protection, but it grows into something far darker. The moment someone decides what others can or cannot read, democracy begins to wither. History has shown us where this path leads. Book bans may seem like isolated acts, but they echo a time when entire regimes decided which ideas were acceptable and which were not. We all remember who once censored books, and later burned them in public squares—the Nazi regime. Their goal was to dominate not only people’s bodies but also their minds, to dictate what was worth reading, thinking, or believing.
That is why I feel grateful to live in a country like Canada, where freedom of thought and expression are cornerstones of our democracy. Here, we are free to read whatever we choose—to learn, to question, to disagree, and to dream. It’s easy to take that freedom for granted when it surrounds us like air. But history reminds us that such liberties are fragile. They exist because others fought to preserve them.
As we observe Remembrance Day, it’s worth reflecting on the meaning of freedom. The soldiers who went to war did not only fight for borders or flags; they fought for the right of future generations to live in free societies—where one could write, read, and speak without fear. The ability to open a book, to explore an idea, or to express a thought without censorship is part of the very freedom they defended.
We honour their sacrifice not just with moments of silence, but by ensuring that those principles endure in everyday life. Each time we defend a writer’s voice, resist censorship, or encourage a child to read freely, we continue that legacy.
Books are, in a way, another form of remembrance. They hold the voices of those who came before us and the dreams of those yet to come. To silence them is to forget who we are.
So, as Remembrance Day reminds us of the cost of freedom, let us also remember that liberty lives in our words, in our stories, and in our right to read them all.
