kids just worked and played and did as they were told. They didn’t waste their time reading comics and worthless novels and daydreaming and fantasizing about far-off places and distant times. And they certainly didn’t waste time researching useless information or ways to contradict what their parents and elders told them to do, or to believe.

I’m telling you, literacy and books are where it all started to go wrong. The government of Gideon gets it right in A Handmaid’s Tale, burning all the books and making it illegal for women to read.