Banning Books
One way to get people to read them
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin
I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about why anyone would want to ban books, and my first thought is that book banning is all about fear and loss of control. It’s a fear born of ignorance, and it doesn’t go away by trying to control something that can’t be controlled. The only way to deal with a fear like this is to open your mind, eliminate the ignorance that fuels the fear. In my humble opinion.
I have many more thoughts about this, but oh I am tired tonight, after so little sleep and so much striving to understand what makes no sense to me. Is that ignorance? No, I think that’s what it means to have an open mind: nothing is as as simple as we make it out to be. One thing I know for sure: book banning is wrong, it is a dangerous step on a slippery slope. But I don’t think that the families, the parents, the men and woman who, with (perhaps) the best of intentions, get caught up in book banning are monsters—unless, of course, they are using the pulpit or their political position to rouse people’s hatred—that is monstrous.
And so, before I call this day over, I found one of those lists that I love to read through and check off the banned books I’ve read. So I’m kicking off Banned Books Week with some classics that were banned in the 20th century. How many of these have you read? Did you read them because they’ve been banned or you just read them and found out later they had been banned?
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Native Son by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
I’ve read 18 - 20 of these. I waffle on the number because I can’t remember which Hemingway I had to read in college, and I know I didn’t read them all. One was enough for me. Some of these are beautiful and profound: Beloved, Of Mice and Men, As I Lay Dying, for starters. Some were beautiful and hard to read because the subject matter was painful: again, Beloved, The Color Purple, Invisible Man, Native Son. Some scared me deeply (that’s “scared” as in afraid, not scarred, as in I’ll-never-recover). Many were memorable for good reasons; one was memorable because it was so horrifying and well-written: In Cold Blood.
Do you have a list you would like to share?
What are your thoughts about banned books? About book banning?
Good night. Sleep well. Tonight to help me sleep I will conjure images of children reading books and parents listening to what their kids have to say about what they’ve read. I’ll think about all the wonderful and amazing and dreadful things I have learned from books, the dark places I’ve gone and the light. I am so grateful for writers who persist, who write books that are emotionally honest and true to their understanding of life. My life would be poorer had they not written, and I hope their sales have increased a thousand-fold over the years for having been banned.
I’ve read more than half of these, though most so many years ago that I barely remember what they were about. I also suspect that I recognize some titles because I saw the movies, rather than having read the books. I did read Lady Chatterley’s Lover purely because it was banned in South Africa, where I grew up. Someone had smuggled the book in following a trip overseas, and it was passed around like a sacred artifact. Likewise, a book called Be Ready with Bells and Drums, about a love affair between a sensitive Black man and a blind young white woman who ignorantly carried her family's racist attitudes, and didn’t know that her lover was Black. So many books were banned in South Africa. Once, for a while, the censorship authorities banned Black Beauty, until it was brought to their attention that the protagonist was a horse.
I've read over half of these. Some were assigned to me in school, some I read because I liked the movie version and some because I felt like they were subversive and radical. I did read Animal Farm probably too early. I was in 4th grade and didn't exactly catch all of the allusions to communism but I knew it was saying something important about our current way of doing things. I recall my mom asking me when I was done what I got out of reading that particular book and I said something like "Well, I think Snowball is a very bad pig." Not a bad assessment for an 11 year old.
I don't believe in banning books. Even if the material goes against the ethics of a cohesive and egalitarian society and promotes nasty ideals of misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, eugenics, nationalism, or things of that nature. I believe that we should have the freedom to read (or NOT read) what we choose. Sometimes reading material like this doesn't convert the readers values but perhaps can help one to understand how/why someone might promote this kind of thinking, as awful as it is. Banning a child's book about a pair of male penguins hatching an egg because it teaches children that's it's "ok to be gay" is horrible. Teaching kids that having same sex parents, or that themselves being queer, is shameful, is the real abomination.