Better yet, stop banning books altogether. The sad fact is the act of banning books is on the rise. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), the organization that compiles data on challenged and banned books and generates the Top Ten Challenged Books List, there was a 17% increase in book censorship complaints last year. In a typical year, 10% of books are banned and pulled from the shelves and it’s time for it to stop.
When I was in high school (one of many I attended as a military brat), a local church hosted a book burning. I remember being shocked people still burned books. It was something I thought was limited to movies or books, a Fahrenheit 451 reality, not something that happened in the real world, in my town. I was wrong. While I refused to attend the bonfire, most people did. That’s when I formed my rather strong stance against censorship of any kind. I could not let go of the horror of it. I wanted to steal the books away and protect them, especially when I would hear other students sharing titles of the books they planned to add to the blaze. Some were favorites. Others were on my to read pile.
In this country we have the right to free speech, which means the right to read all published words. That freedom applies to everyone and everything, not just the works I agree with and love. The books I find offensive enjoy the same right to be read as anything else. But that is not what matters. My opinion should not take precedence over the constitutional right for those works to exist. It is up to me to choose what I will read and will not read, not what can be published or available. The good news is that we do get to choose what we read. That’s the point. There should be varied choices. We should always have the right to choose what we read or listen to and what we ignore. Others do not feel the same way.
I was at a party once when I met a woman who told me she was trying to get a particular show off the air. She was quite angry about it all. Trying to be polite, I asked her what she found offensive about it and she couldn’t tell me. She had never seen the show. Wait…what? Are you as confused as I was? She had never watched the show. What she had done was join a group that whose goal was removing offensive material from the airways and she readily spouted their rhetoric. It was at this point my husband pulled me away from the conversation because he knew I was about to blow. He was right to get me out of there, not only because it was a party filled with his work colleagues and their misguided wives (okay, wife), but also because I was about to jump on my soapbox. Still I never got to argue my point and the encounter lingered, which is why I wrote this post. This woman’s stance was almost as baffling as the woman I met who said she wanted to be a reader but didn’t like to read! Don’t get me started on that one.
The sad reality is that, often, the people trying to remove materials have not read the books in question. They hear snippets or hearsay about the book and decide their morality or opinion matters more than anyone else’s. It doesn’t. If you have not read a book, you can have no opinion of its contents. You are not informed and, therefore, not qualified to comment on specifics or strongly enough to warrant removal of the book. You can say you are not interested in reading the book and why, but you cannot review it. At least, you should not review it. Those two things are quite different.
Read the books yourself. Decide whether a book falls into the “offensive” category. If it does, don’t recommend it. Post reviews stating your opinion. Warn off your friends. But don’t pull it from the shelves. That is going too far.
Like any stubborn person, when a book is challenged or banned it makes me more determined to read it. Perhaps it’s because the book is now an underdog and I want to encourage it in true American fashion (we do love the underdog). I don’t know. Mostly, I want to support the authors whose work has been attacked. Even if I don’t care for the book, I will defend its right to be on the shelf (although I reserve the right to question the editor’s taste).
This week is Banned Books Week. I encourage you to read a banned book from this year’s list or from any previous year’s list. There are some great books included on those lists. You’ve probably read many of them. Read another. Take a stand against censorship in any form. As writers, can there be any other response to this nonsense?
For this year’s list and other information about Banned Books Week, visit the OIF at Banned Books.