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What Banned Books Week Really Means

It’s kind of interesting to look at the opinions, or lack thereof, of the authors of banned books on censorship. R.L Stine, author of the Goosebumps series and many, many other books both scary and funny, doesn’t seem to have much to say. The Goosebumps series was #15 on the list 100 Most Banned/Challenged Books,1990-1999, and was still in the top 100 for the list for 2000-2009, and just last year was challenged in Kirbyville, Texas. But in interviews, he’s rarely asked about censorship of his books, and the most I could find was a comment from him from a chat on CNN that attempting to ban the Harry Potter books was “silly”. Maybe when you’ve written as many books as he has, one person, or school, or library, taking one book from a series with 100+ titles seems pretty insignificant (I’d love to really know what he thinks).

Stephen King, whose book Cujo has been challenged and banned in the past, has made it clear that he opposes book banning, but he’s also said that he doesn’t see it as a major issue. A writer writes, and if he’s defending his books, then he’s not writing. I get that, but he also says he believes a defense should be mounted– but by whom? In a speech he gave titled ” I Want To Be Typhoid Stevie” in 1997 he said that when his books are challenged or banned, he tells kids this:

Don’t get mad, get even… Run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.

His philosophy hasn’t really changed too much. I don’t totally agree with him– I think it’s important for kids to stand up for their right to read, and while you certainly can find at least some of his books there (he’s written so many), not everyone has easy access to a library or bookstore where they can easily acquire a challenged or banned book, or owns an ereader (you can now buy his books online, and some of them are only available as ebooks). Maybe if you tear the house apart you’ll find that your dad has a secret stash (which is how I first tripped over King’s books). Or maybe not. If he doesn’t protest challenges to his books, and kids don’t, who in a divided community will provide that defense? A school librarian may be an amazing advocate who carries the day… but it scares me just to think about doing it myself.

But, he points out, and I think this is a point well taken, in the United States, we all have the right to protest a challenge to a book, or a book banning, to give copies of a banned book away openly (as the Kurt Vonnegut Library did in a recent controversy over Slaughterhouse-Five), or to acquire a banned book without persecution. There are parts of the world where that isn’t possible, and times in history when it has been vigorously enforced. Even though we aren’t living in one of those places, or through one of those times, and even though banning books is a serious issue here, he notes in a 1992 essay:

There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author’s works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin “the boss” and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for “The Gulag Archipelago.”

I discovered that Banned Books Week inspires defenders of human rights, who fight for freedom of speech and freedom of expression for writers and journalists who are witnesses to oppression and who live in or write about these places. In America, our right to stand up for the freedom to read resonates throughout the world. In the world of school librarianship, connectedness, collaboration, and social justice are essential concepts to share. Something for all of us to think about is the way Banned Books Week affects not just individual challenges here, but human rights around the world, and the courage to fight for freedom of expression in the face of danger. If you visit our Pinterest board on Banned Books, I shared links there to some organizations that contribute to continuing that fight, and I hope that you’ll check them out. And many thanks to Mr. King to providing quite a bit of food for thought.

 

Posted on September 30, 2012 by , Reply

Why Wait For Banned Books Week?

Given my ability to do anything on time these days, I’m going to go ahead and share the latest news on banned books now, as all is not quiet on the censorship front (to mangle the words of  Erich Maria Remarque, himself author of a banned book).  Following the recent controversy over the banning of Slaughterhouse Five and Twenty Boy Summer (which I’ve already written about) just a few days ago the Sherlock Holmes novella A Study in Scarlet was banned  in Albermarle County, Virginia for its anti-Mormon sentiment (which I’m afraid I missed noticing when I devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories in middle school. It seems like kids don’t pick up nearly what adults do from many of these books). Sex, violence, and religion aren’t the only reasons parents challenge books, although those are common reasons, and it’s not only conservatives who object to the content of books in libraries and schools. Brave New World was banned in a school district in Seattle for its portrayal of American Indians as savages, and a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published with the removal of a word we dare not say these days, to make it palatable for schools. Sometimes a word is all it takes.

A lot of people point out that during Banned Books Week, ALA also mentions challenged books (and therefore, it appears that more books are banned than actually are).  The list below, though, is of books actually removed from libraries in the past six months (courtesy of information provided by the ALA for this article in USA Today). Read any of them? Maybe it’s time.

1. Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher

2. Big Momma Makes the World, by Phyllis Root

3. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan

4. Burn, by Suzanne Phillips

5. Great Soul, by Joseph Lelyveld

6. It’s a Book, by Lane Smith

7. Lovingly Alice, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

8. The Marbury Lens, by Andrew Smith

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

10. Mobile Suit Gundam: Seed Astray Vol. 3, by Tomohiro Chiba

11. My Darling, My Hamburger, by Paul Zindel

12. The Patron Saint of Butterflies, by Cecilia Galante

13. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

14. Pit Bulls and Tenacious Guard Dogs, by Carl Semencic

15. Push, by Sapphire

16. Shooting Star, by Fredrick McKissack Jr.

17. The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley, by Colin Thompson

18. Vegan Virgin Valentine, by Carolyn Mackler

19. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

20. “What’s Happening to My Body?”: Book for Boys, by Lynda Madaras with Area Madaras

 

Source: Jennifer Petersen, the American Library Association

Posted on August 22, 2011 by , Reply

The Silver Lining?

Okay, let me just say right out that banning books is just wrong.

There’s a particular incident of book banning that is drawing a lot of attention right now, and that’s the banning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer from the schools of Republic, Missouri. One Wesley Scroggins challenged the books, as well as Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, saying that they taught principles contrary to the Bible.

School libraries really take a beating in the censorship wars. People are so bound and determined to protect their children from anything that might violate their innocence.  And, unlike public libraries, schools are in loco parentis, which means they are supposed to act  “in place of the parent”.  The simplest thing to do is to just take the book off the shelf when a parent complains, or when your principal is staring you down.  It doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, but putting yourself out there at the possible cost of losing your job is a scary thing to do. That sort of informal, er, agreement, happens a lot at the classroom or building level. It happens more when there’s no selection policy or challenge procedure in place. One of the things that gets drilled into you early in library school is to make sure you have a detailed selection policy and a formal challenge procedure in your policy manual. While a lot of parental objections are easily dealt with on the individual level (Oh, you don’t want your son reading Junie B. Jones? Let him know he isn’t supposed to check those books out- you can always return them), a selection policy spells out how and why you choose the materials you do, and a formal challenge procedure means that challenge will go up the line, as far as it needs to, and as publicly as possible.

So Wesley Scroggins challenged these three books, and instead of a principal hiding them in a closet, or a school board voting against them without even reading them, the school board did something I think is pretty neat. It’s not something they HAD to do. They developed and used a selection policy and went through a formal challenge process. Nothing about it was a secret. Just the way ALA wants it to be, although the results are obviously NOT the ones ALA, or almost any librarian, wants them to be, with Twenty Boy Summer and Slaughterhouse Five removed from the schools.  But because of that policy and all the discussion that took place, Speak, the third challenged book, has remained in the schools there.

Am I cheering for the school board’s decision to remove the books from the schools? Heck no. But the silver lining here is that because the school board took this so seriously, and because they had a selection policy and formal challenge procedure, it may be a lot simpler to appeal the decision, and, I hope, get it reversed. And nobody was fired, either.

In the meantime, if you’d like to make certain that the students of Republic, Missouri will have access to copies of Slaughterhouse Five, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is giving copies to them for free. If you would like to contribute a donation to make that possible, click here. I don’t think Sarah Ockler, the author of Twenty Boy Summer, has a similar setup, but perhaps, if you’d like to see the students of Republic, Missouri have access to her book as well, you could send a copy, or a designated donation, to the
Republic Branch Library of the Springfield-Greene County Library System, as all the copies appear to be checked out, and there’s a list for holds.

You don’t have to wait for September and Banned Books Week. Now is a great time to read, and give, a banned book.

Posted on August 6, 2011 by , 5 comments