There’s nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.

What people remember isn’t the book itself, so much as the furor: ministers in church denounced it as obscene, not only here; the public library was forced to remove it from the shelves, the one bookstore in town refused to stock it. There was word of censoring it. People snuck off to Stratford or London or Toronto even, and obtained their copies on the sly, as was the custom then with condoms. Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee—even the ones who’d never thought of opening a novel before. There’s nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, ch 3, "The Presentation," p. 39 of the 1st Anchor Books edition, Sept. '01.