“Nothing corrodes young minds
quite so much as reading.” -Alexander
Nazaryan, The Banned Books of Alabama, The Atlantic Wire
If you’ve been to your local library
or logged onto any social networking site this week, you may have heard that
it’s Banned Books Week, an event observed the last week of every September when
readers are encouraged to celebrate the freedom to read. Ever the rebel, I had to revisit the ALA
Office for Intellectual Freedom’s 2013 List of Banned Books released in April to
see if I’d missed out on anything I should not only be corrupting my own mind
with but those of my children as well.
Number 1 on the list, perceived by
idiots somewhere, supposedly in great numbers, to be the most dangerous book
for undermining adult authority amongst young children: The Captain Underpants books by Dav
Pilkey. The books have been praised
because they’ve encouraged middle-grade boys to read when fewer and fewer
titles lately have done so. “Not so
fast!” cry some parents and educators, pointing to the bathroom humor and irreverent
attitude of the title character. A boy
with a superhero persona that runs around in his tighty whiteys pitted against
a villainous middle school principal is a threat and must be silenced! Nevermind the lesson that authority should sometimes be questioned or the
cautionary tale that all adults in powerful positions aren't always honorable.
Numbers
2 and 3 on the list, Sherman Alexie’s prize-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why find themselves on
the list for “racism/sexually explicit” and “drugs/sex/suicide”
respectively. Heaven forbid we have
young people reading subject matter that may actually be relevant to them. This will never do! We can’t have our youth turning to books in
order to feel that they aren’t alone in facing the struggles of
adolescence. Shouldn’t they be on
Twitter or Instagram for that?!
No
surprise was E. L. James’ multimillion selling erotic trilogy Fifty Shades, ranked at No. 4. This is one I hope the kiddos will wait a
good long while before delving into.
Last summer, we saw a sex toy shop billboard emblazoned with the words
“Butt Plugs”, I kid you not, in three-foot lettering, on the way to
Jacksonville, Florida to board a cruise for the Bahamas, and I spent a goodly
amount of the drive squashing debates amongst the chirren about what, why,
wherefore and how such a devise would ever be called for and utilized. It wasn’t pretty and quite frankly, neither
is Fifty Shades of DooDoo as I’ve
taken to calling it—and not just for its own butt plug references. (I found James’ writing to be poor and her take on Twilight unimaginative,
but that is a post for another day.)
Numbers
5 and 6, And Tango Makes Three by
Peter Parnell and The Kite Runner by
Khaled Hosseini, can thank their audacity at trying to incorporate the reality
of homosexuality into their narratives for landing on the list. These books are unfit for common consumption
according to objectors. Damn gay
penguins! Ain’t nobody got time for that! Society can’t have our youth learning
tolerance and compassion. Look where
that got us in the 1960’s!
Looking for Alaska by John Green ranks at Number 7
for offensive language and being sexually explicit/unsuited for age group. Bet some of these same parents don’t have a
problem letting their kids watch Dance
Moms and Toddlers & Tiaras,
both of which are real threats to
human decency.
Number
8, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by
Alvin Swartz, gave me pause. My mother
and I regularly gather all the children in our family around large bon fires in
the fall and try to scare the begeezus out of them—or at least make them wet
their pants a trickle—with Swartz’s books and others like it. Their friends beg for invitations to these
readings, and now I can’t help but be a tad worried one of the little beastie’s
parents might turn me in to child protective services when Junior decides he
won’t be bathing or sleeping alone until college. Hmmmmm.
Number
9, The Glass Castle by Jeanette
Walls, is a 2005 memoir recounting Walls’ and her siblings’ unconventional,
poverty-stricken upbringing at the hands of their deeply dysfunctional
parents. This book should be every
parent’s go-to reading assignment for the kid that complains that they don’t
have enough Hollister or Abercrombie & Fitch. In a showdown a couple of weeks ago, one of
my own teenage sons suggested that I was a bad parent because he didn’t have
any clean t-shirts. He hurled another
insult about reheated green beans or some such crap. This weekend he’ll have lots of free time to
read The Glass Castle.
Rounding
out 2013’s top ten most threatening collection of words is Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The main reasons given for objections to the work: sexually explicit/religious
viewpoint/violence. There’s nothing that
gets a book banners panties in a wad quite like stories that question long-held
religious standards and beliefs. And
violence is almost always unsuitable to these self-appointed guardians of good
taste and morality—no matter how historically accurate. Beloved
is a beautiful work that had a powerful impact on me and made me a fan of
Toni Morrison forever. Before this book,
I’d never fully appreciated the horrors of slavery, the lengths a mother might
go to in order to protect her children from it, or what a haunted lifetime of
regret could do to someone.
Every year, dozens of books are
challenged and requested to be removed from school reading lists and public
library shelves by “concerned” parents and citizens objecting to the opinions
and/or the subject matter they contain. These
challenges attempt to restrict or remove the access of others based on an
individual or group’s point of view alone.
Successful challenges result in a banning or removal of those
materials. The American Library
Association calls this “a threat to freedom of speech and choice.” I agree.
Now, hurry on out to your local
library or book store and pick up one of these titles to corrupt the minds of a
young person you love. They’ll emerge
from their reading experience a richer and more enlightened person, though I
can’t promise that they won’t also feel the urge to strip down to their undies
and don a cape.
