Assistant English Professor Todd Giles will give a 20-minute talk, “Books are better for banning and burning than page turning,” Sept. 25 at 5 p.m. in Moffett Library in honor of Banned Books Week. Wine and snacks will be served and Giles will feature several banned books from the library’s rare book collection in addition to some rare books of his own.

“The reason I’m doing it is because I want to promote the rare books collection,” Giles said. “We’ve pulled what they have, rare book wise, stuff that’s been banned or some of the more obvious stuff and then I’m bringing in my own stuff. I’ve got a lot of first editions. They’re going to be in a glass case.”

Giles said it will be more of a layman’s talk, adding that his goal is for the audience to question the motivation for book banning.

“What not to expect is a comprehensive discussion of book banning, but rather a series of questions to get the audience thinking about who bans books, why they’re banned. I’m not at all a book-banning expert,” Giles said. “It’s just to get people to question. I’m going to preface the talk, I think, by saying that I’m not an expert in this field, and I just started writing down a bunch of questions and I left them because I think the questions are actually better than having answers in a way.”