Finally, book-based travel raises ethical possibilities that literal travel cannot always match. It is carbon-light, accessible, and safe; yet it also confronts borders of a different kind, from censorship to market silos. Banned Books Week (American Library Association) reminds us that curtailed reading is curtailed movement, while histories of samizdat show how readers smuggled ideas past walls. The remedy is breadth: read across languages, genres, and identities to avoid replacing one narrow map with another. In doing so, we honor Lahiri’s promise—arriving widely, even when we stay still. [...]
