Hi, I'm MSNBC's Ali Velshi, and this is the Velshi Band Book Club podcast. You already know about the book banning

epidemic infiltrating our classrooms, affecting our children, and playing a major role in our upcoming

election. And I'm sure you know the numbers. Fifteen hundred titles banned last year alone. But do you know the stories? Each week a different author

joins me to open their band book and carefully examine their writing, like Margaret Atwood.

Why The Handmaid's Tale? It's the sex violence and also the fact that this totalitarian regime is a theocracy, which purports to be

Christian. So they have, of course, distorted everything. Lori Halse Anderson, author of speak.

Using stories, using books, that is the age-old way that we get better at things. That's how we share

our wisdom, how we share our values, our ethics, information. By creating literate citizens,

that's how we take our country to the place it should be in. And many more. The Velshi Band Book Club

podcast transcends news

coverage of the book bands to focus on the titles themselves. Through these conversations,

we discover what's behind each author's work and why that loud voice at a school board meeting

is so scared of it. Fiction is supposed to be an escape, but if you write about topics like I choose to, what you do is get readers invested in the story and in the characters.

And by the time that the last page is turned, you've forced them to confront an issue that maybe they didn't want to confront.

And you've done it in a way that allows them to look at all sides of a situation. We like to call it reading as resistance. Listen to the Velsheban Book Club

podcast and resist with us each week. Follow wherever you're listening now. The first two episodes

are available Thursday, August 24th.