Banned Books Week 2023
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For Banned Books Week this year, I posted about several books that I have taught or read that have been frequently banned or challenged. Some of them I love. Some changed me as a person. If someone had banned them, I might not be the person I am today. And while I may not be perfect (who is?), the ideas and values I received from books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and A Wrinkle in Time are possibly some of the very best parts of me.
This week our school media specialist had to send us more lists of books that we need to pull off our shelves if we have them, and to stop teaching if we were planning to.
I wish there was more light and less heat in these debates. I think we can all agree that there is room for nuance here, but some people cannot broach nuance: they want things to be black and white and will not listen to the opposing side. Do I think every book is appropriate for every grade level? Definitely not. But do I think kids are a lot more savvy and ask a lot more questions than most adults give them credit for? Absolutely.
There are books I think are valuable for kids to read – especially older kids – that I would not feel comfortable reading aloud in my classroom. But I think kids should be able to read them on their own. If individual parents object to that book for their child, they can.
There seems to be an absolutism to the voices that want to ban books that any mention of sex, depiction of sex, or challenge to traditional sex roles must be wiped out of our schools. But as my high school pastor, in many ways as conservative a man as I have ever known, pointed out at my church youth group, we are sexual beings from the time we are children. From a religious standpoint, God made us that way.
There seems to be a fantasy out there that kids are asexual and innocent and never think about sex, that kids never need learn about it until they are married in a committed relationship, and then they will find out about sex… somehow? And until then, the less they know, the better.
People are throwing the word pornography around, but here is a vast difference between pornography and some of the novels and plays that I read as a teen that included sex. The novels made me think about relationships and how we treat other people. They made me think about how sex can be used and misused and made me ponder the nature of healthy relationships. I read some non-fiction psychology books that included sexual material as well. It was not salacious. It was thought-provoking. So much so, that by the time I wrote an essay for my American Musical Theater class, about the Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman musical Follies, my teacher wrote on my paper (which I still have) “You have a very mature grasp of adult relationships.”
There are things in Follies that would probably get it banned today were it being widely taught in schools.
My wife and I have talked about the fact that reading about things in novels and plays didn’t inspire us to run out and do them – it made us less likely to be taken advantage of or to things thoughtlessly or before we were ready.
In a world where kids are on on their phones with 24/7 access to an internet full of videos, fan fiction, and all kinds of “exciting” content, thoughtful depictions of the human experience should be the least of our worries.
And reading something does not equal agreeing with it. Are there books I disagree with? Sure. Do I think no one else should have the right to read them? No.
Two quotes come to mind. From the Roman playwright Terrance: “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
And from someone, probably an American (attribution is hard to pin down) “I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.
Below are my posts for this year’s Banned Books Week.
THIS YEAR’S BANNED BOOKS POSTS
Banned Books Week – Book 1: To Kill a Mockingbird. I was a sci-fi/fantasy reader pretty exclusively, but when I read TKAM as a 9th grader, I realized that realistic fiction could be amazing as well. This book is often banned because of its racist language (which is used to show the evils of racism) and a plot that centers on a rape accusation. Others object to the book because they see Atticus Finch as a “white savior” character. But if those things are all you see, you are missing out on a funny, tragic, magical, moving story about appearance and reality, justice and injustice, egalitarianism and prejudice, and coming of age. All I need to do is think about the word “Hey, Boo!” and I tear up.
Banned Books Week – Book 2: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This book about the dangers of banning (and burning) books is one of other favorites of all time. It’s been banned for violence and for characters plotting to overthrow the government. One of the major ironies about it is that the publisher asked for Bradbury’s permission to clean up some of the (very mild) cussing for a special high school edition. He agreed. Ten years later he found out that they’d switched to that edition for the “adult” edition too. The books about censorship was… censored! Bradbury demanded the original text be restored and only allowed the original to be published after that. Interestingly, he never really addresses the major issue causing censorship today: accusations of obscenity. What he does address though, in a startlingly prescient manner, is the results of a whole society not reading books but getting addicted to technology and speed. This isn’t just a book about burning books… it’s a book about life.
Banned Books Week – Book 3 – A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle- This Newberry-winning YA book has been called too religious but also Satanic and occult. Some people have also thought the scenes where the characters “tesseract” from place to place sexually arousing. Go figure. I guess you see what you’re looking for. A Wrinkle in Time is a book that broke open new possibilities for children’s literature: part sprawling adventure, part rescue mission, part dystopian cautionary tale, it is mystical and deep and enormous fun. I first encountered it in 5th grade and it led me to read many, many of L’Engle’s books! Her non-fiction musings on art, faith, life, and mystery have enriched my life immensely. I’m glad it wasn’t banned where I lived!
Banned Books Week – Book 4 – The Giver by Lois Lowry – On the surface, this sounds like an awful book, which is why it is probably challenged a lot. A YA dystopian novel about a “perfect,” painless community, it does have mild sex dreams, suicide, infanticide, and euthanasia. But those things are all to make a point. It was first recommended to me by my high school pastor, who I was visiting with several years later at the start of my teaching career. He said it was an excellent meditation on what happens when we try to live completely without pain. He recommended it. It is a book about the importance of history, of memory, and (like A Wrinkle in Time) about the power of love. It goes to extremes to show how much we miss when we try to hide portions of life away because we don’t like them. It’s worth noting that one of the things they hide away is all the books except the community’s rule book. In an added note, I drew a cartoon about The Giver (based on something a student said about it in class), and I got to share it with Lois Lowry and got a lovely reply. I just found the comic!
Banned Books Week – Books 5, 6, 7, and 8 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Slaughter House 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, and 1984 by George Orwell. I grouped these books together because I read them all in 2016 as part of my project to read books that I never had assigned to me in school. I decided on these because they all had numbers in the titles. All have been banned for one reason or another… violence, sex, language. But mostly I think these four got banned for being… subversive. Characters challenge authority and see the absurdity of what people in power ask them – or force them – to do. It strikes me as the height of irony that the people who talk the most about liberty and freedom often hate people who stand up for their freedoms against authoritarianism so much that they want to stop us from reading books about people who stand up for their freedoms. That’s trying to stamp out freedom two ways – by objecting to fictional characters’ freedom, and by taking away other people’s freedom to read whatever they want.
Banned Books Week – Book 9 – Flowers for Algernon – by Daniel Keyes (who I met once!) This story was first published as a short story and was in the Prentice Hall textbook I taught from for years. I have read the novel version but never taught it. I don’t remember any sex scenes, but if that’s all you’re getting out of this story – in either of its forms – you are obsessed with sex scenes at the expense of appreciating a moving story. Two lists of books just came out in our districts: on list of books to be immediately pulled from shelves, and another list of books considered suspect and likely to be pulled soon. Flowers for Algernon, the novel version was one. If you don’t know about this story, it is the story of a man with an IQ of 68 who has an operation to triple his intelligence to super-genius level. It is written in first person as a series of “progress reports” for the scientists, and the first ones are very simplistic and filled with spelling and proofreading errors. Once he starts to get more intelligent, he writing, thought patterns, and personality start to change on the page. It is stunningly written. I taught the short story for many years, and I eventually reached the point where I could no longer read the final entries aloud to the class or I would sob. I had to enlist a student to read the ending (apologies to my daughter Alex, who got stuck doing it when she was in my class!). This story is incredibly well-written, thought provoking, and very, very moving. Thanks to the novel version being banned, I’d probably be wise to avoid teaching the short story now either – it’s guilty by implication. Sad.