Lucy in the Sky with Banned Books!

Picture yourself in a chair by the window
With chamomile tea, curled up with a book
Suddenly, someone peers over your shoulder,
The censor, with flames in his eyes.

“You should not read that book, it’s full of blasphemy,
Sex, and political lies,
I must protect you from thoughts that will harm your mind,
To implement my designs.”

Celebrate the freedom to read,
Don’t give in to others' creeds,
That’s what makes a democracy! 
R E A D   F R E E

* * * Banned Books Week is observed every year at the end of September.  Don't let the censors win; celebrate your freedom to read freely!

Banned Books display at Newport Public Library

Banned Books Round Up

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches." — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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We’re nearing the end of Banned Books Week, and what a week it’s been! Our events and displays have garnered attention and sparked quite a few conversations at the circulation desk, but there has also been a wider dialog happening in the media around the continuing attempts to censor literature for children and young adults (e.g., banning and unbanning Invisible Man, cancelling a young adult author’s speaking engagement, banning Dreaming in Cuban).

Many interesting pieces about banned and challenged books for youth have been making the rounds on the internet, so I’ve decided to put together a little collection of them for you mull over: 

 A Dirty Little Secret: Self-Censorship

A Plea for Book Censors to Stand Down 
  
Could Banning Books Actually Encourage More Readers?

Darkness too Visible 

True Love, Book Fights, And Why Ugly Stories Matter
 
If after looking through these links you feel like picking up a banned book, come swing by the library—we have plenty!


 



 

First they banned the books

 
Banned Books displays often elicit impassioned responses. “Why are you banning books?” “Who would want to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” “Don’t people know this is how Hitler started?”

All of these are valid questions, and I’d like to take a few moments to address each one.

1. Our library is not banning books; we have a display about books that have been banned. Our annual recognition of Banned Books Week highlights our belief that freedom in reading is closely tied to freedom of thought and speech.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been challenged and banned since it was written. It was banned in Concord, Massachusetts in 1895 as “trash and suitable only for the slums,” excluded from the children’s room of the Brooklyn Public Library in 1905 on the grounds that “Huck not only itched but scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration,” and for the past sixty years it has been challenged for its “liberal use of racial slurs.”
3. Throughout history, authoritarian leaders have tried to control how people think, and one of the methods is to prohibit books that represent alternate viewpoints. Akhenaton, a pharaoh who tried to introduce monotheism to ancient Egypt, ordered books on polytheism burned. William Tyndale, the first person to translate the Bible into English from its original Hebrew and Greek, was tried for heresy and burned at the stake in 1536, along with copies of his Bible. Most infamously in modern history, on the pretext of affirming traditional German values, the Nazi German Student Association burned upwards of 25,000 “un-German” books.

Not every banned book necessarily leads to a totalitarian society, but the loss of one right can make the next loss easier to accept, until at some point, the freedom once taken for granted cannot be regained. That is the message of precautionary stories like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and the reason we highlight Banned Books Week every year.

The American Library Association has a list of the most frequently challenged or banned books in the 21st Century.  Are any of your favorite books on the list?

Say “Cheese” for Banned Books!

The Newport Library would like to take your photo holding a banned book, to use in our display case and website to promote awareness of Banned Books Week. Come to the library on Tuesday, August 28, and have your picture taken with a book of your choice! We will have plenty of books for you to choose from, or you can bring your own.

Perhaps you don’t read “those kinds” of books? What about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland, The Grapes of Wrath, Fahrenheit 451, or the Bible? Each of these titles has been considered dangerous, inappropriate, or unsuitable by someone who has sought to keep others from reading them. The most frequently challenged books of the last decade can be viewed on the American Library Association’s website.

Don’t take threats to our freedom to read lightly. As George Bernard Shaw so aptly expressed it, “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

Thank You, Madeleine L'Engle

I first read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time when I was in fourth or fifth grade at Saint Jane Francis DeChantal school in Bethesda, Maryland. And to this day, what I remember most about this astonishing book was that, after reading it, the world didn’t seem quite the same place anymore. It was a feeling both exhilarating and, to be honest, not a little scary for a kid from the comfortable suburbs of Washington, DC circa 1968.

Before tackling A Wrinkle in Time, I’d pretty much confined my reading to The Hardy Boys, Boys’ Life magazine and biographies of the Founding Fathers. And in their own way, reading these things influenced my lifelong love for adventure, current events and history. But it was a particularly non-challenging reading list even for grade-schooler. Frank and Joe Hardy always solved their assigned mystery. I would eventually reject the Boys’ Life way of life for something a little more fulfilling. And, though inspirational, the juvenile biographies published in the 1960’s lacquered an unreal gloss over the lives of such figures as George Washington and Paul Revere.

So when Madeliene L’Engle took me with her and the Murrys on a journey through space and time to find the children’s missing father, I was awestruck by just how weird and beautiful a thing imagination, and to a larger extent, the world itself, could be. Following Meg and Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin to the colorless planet Ixchel , meeting the tentacled “Aunt Beast” or confronting an evil intelligence, the IT, who could only be destroyed by love, tore the world open for me. Suddenly, everything, or nearly everything, became possible.

Maybe that means A Wrinkle In Time introduced me to “serious” literature: books about ideas to be considered even at the relatively young age of eight or nine. And maybe I didn’t even realize it at the time. But I haven’t lost that love for considering ideas about life in books, serious or otherwise. And for that I want to thank you, Madeliene L’Engle.

I hate to gush, but...

What a great book.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is about a high school freshman named Albert "Junior" Spirit, who lives on the Spokane Reservation. Junior is smart, talented, and ambitious. He gets mad when he discovers that his geometry textbook is the same one his mother used. Literally, the very same book, over twenty years old. Junior realizes that, if he wants to succeed, he has to get off the rez.

Junior's plan to go to an all-white high school, twenty miles away, meets with serious resistance. Lots of people think he's betraying his heritage. They call him an apple: red on the outside, white on the inside. Meanwhile, the students at the white high school greet him with racist jokes and bullying.

This is serious stuff, and it gets worse: poverty, alcoholism, crime, abuse. But here's the surprising thing: this book is funny. It's hilarious. Junior's comments on life are never dark. His cartoons, like the book itself, are lighthearted and snappy, even when, like this one, they address a serious topic: the humiliation of poverty.

Not a week after I finished The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I read that it was one of the ten most challenged books of 2010. That means that, in schools and libraries across the country, people have tried to keep other people from reading it.

The American Library Association's Readers' Bill of Rights says that everyone has a right not to read a book. Part-Time Indian contains some salty language and some violent situations, and if you don't want to read that, you have the right. But to argue that the book is inappropriate for a library or a school reading list just strikes me as deeply misguided. This is a terrific book, about a courageous kid who stands up for himself against adversity and discrimination.

This week is National Library Week. Why not celebrate by reading a challenged book? There's good stuff on that list.

A gr8 deb8

According to the American Library Association, the most-challenged books of 2009 were a trilogy of young adult novels by Lauren Myracle: ttyl, ttfn, and l8er, g8er.

Challenges to these books have included: requests to restrict access to the books by moving them; requests to limit them to those over a certain age; requests to label them as explicit; and requests to remove them from libraries completely. Reasons cited include offensive language and that useful umbrella term, "unsuited to age group."

Naturally, I immediately checked out ttyl and read it.

The book is composed of the Instant Message conversation of three tenth-grade girls. Angela loves parties, clothes, and boys; she is also generous and kind. Maddie is reckless and outspoken, but vulnerable to the stings of peer pressure. Zoe is serious and wants to be taken seriously, which is why she's been spending so much time outside school with one of her teachers: he respects her.

It's a little hard for me to imagine what all the furor is all about. It's true that the language these girls use is sometimes profane. They gossip, meanly. They speculate about sex, and they are aware that sex, drugs, and alcohol are available to them, if they choose. But although they flirt with danger, they are basically responsible kids. They engage in some naughty talk and some unwise behavior, but they remain good friends.

The truth is, I enjoyed this quick and funny read, textspeak and all ("what r u 2 luvbirds up to this weekend?"). I wonder if some of the indignation it arouses comes from the fact that it consists of IMs. After all, IMs can't possibly have any sort of social value or literary merit.

Can they?

Banning the Bible?

Many a writer has had his works banned from schools and libraries. Only a few were considered so dangerous, so heretical to orthodox cultural norms, that they had to pay with their lives.

One who did pay the ultimate price was William Tyndale. Born in Tudor England, Tyndale graduated with a Masters in theology at Oxford and was ordained into the priesthood shortly thereafter. Fluent in eight languages, Tyndale bounced around from job to job as private tutor, chaplain to the rich, and eventually found his passion in translating classical and religious works into English.

Under the influence of some of the Reformation’s greatest thinkers (he may have studied with Erasmus), Tyndale came to challenge the belief that the study of Scripture was the sole privilege of clerics. Finding no sympathetic ear to his ideas in England, he traveled to Germany, where he continued his work. Even on the Protestant mainland, however, Tyndale was considered too democratic, too populist a reformer to be ignored. England’s king, Henry VIII, asked the Emperor Charles to extradite him, and Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in Belgium. He was burned at the stake, after being mercifully garotted beforehand. His books were burned in the streets.

His crime? Translating the Latin bible into English without permission of the authorities.

Banned Books Week meets Marian the Librarian

I love that song from The Music Man, "Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little," where the good ladies of River City accuse Marian the Librarian of advocating dirty books:

"He left River City the Library building
But he left all the books to her
Chaucer!
Rabelais!
Balzac!"

Marian meets with their disapproval, because she kept the books on the shelf.



I have to admit I’ve never read Rabelais or Balzac, but having read Canterbury Tales in high school and beyond, I find it hard to believe Chaucer’s writings were once considered scandalous. Yet even today, people get all in a twitter about books they want to protect the rest of us from reading.

In recognition of Banned Books Week, our library is displaying a few of the hundreds of books that were challenged or banned during the past year. These include Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Grendel by John Gardner, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

We are also hosting a Banned Books Panel to read from and discuss challenged and banned books this coming Wednesday, September 30 at 7:00 p.m. Readers for the panel discussion will be Doug Hoffman, media specialist for Lincoln County Schools; Lori Tobias, writer for the Oregonian; Bernice Barnett, former Lincoln County District Attorney; Matt Love, writer and English teacher at Newport High School; Wyma Rogers, former Newport Library director, and Andrew Rodman, poet and editor of In Good Tilth. Each person has selected a book that has been challenged or banned, and will read an excerpt from the book.

In the spirit of Marian the Librarian, we invite you to come into our library and check out a 'banned book.' Don’t let the censors take away your freedom to read!

Lessons learned from a "banned book"

If I had known one of my favorite banned books was a banned book when I read it as a grade schooler almost 50 years ago, I wonder if it would have made the read different. Would I have hidden it or myself away, so as not to be found out, or would I have been defiant, making sure everyone could see what I was reading?

A Wrinkle in Time, a story by Madeleine L’Engle, almost didn’t get printed. It is filled with questions and issues not usually found in children’s literature at that time. When I first read the challenges many years after the first read, I had to go back and read the book again to look for the objections. If anything it made me look and find even more meaning and brought me more understanding.

A few of the many things I learned from this book: Time is relative. Science is amazing. People are easily led. Courage is often scary. The ugly duckling story can come true. A person grows into each challenge if given the opportunity. And above all, love is healing. Now, I have to admit it has taken years for me to realize some of these gems and I’m almost certain more are hidden in the pages, and will be there when I need them.

I read this title and many of L’Engle’s others every few years. I think this is a book everyone should read, but you should have that choice, to read or not to read. - Jan