Home » Discussion Forums » Blog Post Discussion » Banned Books Week. Sigh.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34542 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Mon, 27 September 2010 21:36   |
 librarykat
Messages: 566
Registered: October 2008
Location: Redneck Riviera |
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Yes. <sigh> Years ago, in a branch library in Hawaii, I set up a Banned Books Week display in our hallway glass case, for which I used a couple of BBW posters from ALA. A female patron, young military wife with a couple of little kids, accosted me in the hallway and told me my display was terrible, because I was promoting homosexuality. One of the posters had a fairly small b&w photo of a gay rights parade. You had to really look closely to see it. I told her that gays are part of our community and I wasn't going to ignore them, because "this is a public library, we serve the entire community." Her answer: I know you do, but they don't deserve any rights. <sigh>
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34543 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Mon, 27 September 2010 21:38 |
Catlady
Messages: 230
Registered: December 2008
Location: Aurora, Colorado |
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I found a line in a book once in which the characters are looking up information in the library, and the government has banned the books they're trying to find. The librarian huffs and says something to the effect of "I'm a librarian. It's my job to give you access to information. If you want a book on how to..." -- you know, it's occurring to me that this might not be a suitable quote for a family-friendly blog. It ends, "...then I'm going to give it to you." Anyway, it's a very funny line and she shows the two girls into the back room where they've conveniently not gotten around to getting rid of the banned books (on purpose) and they do their research and save the day.
Edit: I've just realized that I censored myself on a blog about banned books. Which fills up my quota for irony for the day. Ah, well. Being a role model is so hard sometimes...
[Updated on: Mon, 27 September 2010 21:40]
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34551 is a reply to message #34544 ] |
Mon, 27 September 2010 23:59 |
librarykat
Messages: 566
Registered: October 2008
Location: Redneck Riviera |
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| anutt wrote on Mon, 27 September 2010 21:28 |
Can I just put a plug in for not villainizing the people who call for books to be banned?
Making those people into The Other is exactly the kind of thing Robin has so eloquently (and frequently) spoken out against. So many discussions about banned books turn into hate-on sessions against the people on the opposite side, and while it is hard to remain civil when someone advocates censorship for what we see as ridiculous reasons, remaining civil is precisely what we need to do. And please keep in mind that while book-banners do include people like Mr. Scroggins, they also include parents who are simply trying to do their best to raise their kids in a world that is increasingly kid-un-friendly. They may be misguided, but they are not The Enemy.
This week, let's remember that the only enemy here is censorship itself.
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And that's why, every time I had to write a letter to answer a book challenge, I started by saying that I appreciated the parent's efforts to help his/her own child.
The problem is that too many of them will go beyond just trying to raise their own kids to attempt to dictate terms to everyone else in their community. It's one thing to tell your own child "I'm sorry, honey, but I think this book might be a little too much for you now. Wait a while." I've done this to my own son. But when they go directly to the press and screech about how awful the library is in pushing "porn," while totally bypassing the established procedure of making complaints to the library, they've made themselves the Enemy by making us, the librarians, into the Other. Or by telling me that a particular group of people doesn't deserve to have any civil rights simply because of their sexual orientation.
Sorry, but I've been fighting this fight for more than a quarter-century. I still remain civil to the complainers and do my very best to find a just, respectful, and peaceful resolution to situations. And this better be my final rant on the matter.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34552 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 00:31 |
EMoon
Messages: 664
Registered: March 2009 |
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I blogged earlier today that my mother never censored my reading, but that's not entirely true. She disapproved of violent comic books, and I was allowed to own only a few comic books. I did read some lurid war-comics that belonged to my cousin Jim (one summer in Colorado) and at someone else's house, but they weren't as exciting as the boys thought.
So I read violent military history instead (I'm not sure she realized the age at which I started reading things like "Horned Pigeon" in the history section of the library--a memoir by a POW in a German camp who kept trying to escape. Nor was that interest brought on by Jim's comics...this was the immediate post WWII period, segueing into the Korean War, and the ramp-up to full-blown Cold War, so conflict was all around us, along with all those veterans. The veterans wouldn't tell us about war--and we were all intensely curious about something the adults thought so important--but unmentionable.)
On the other hand, comics aside, she did fight with the librarian at the public library, to allow me to read beyond my age/grade designation and even get into the adult stacks. From about 7 on I was free. And it was glorious. For the first few years, of course, I did stay mostly in the children's room, reading all the horse and dog and adventure books. Then, having exhausted that room (having no interest in the goody=goody biographies except when required to earn a reading certificate at school..."So and So: Boy This" and "So and So: Girl That" were too tame) I moved out into the larger world. First in nonfiction (I was mad for encyclopedias, atlases, bigger dictionaries) and then...the whole universe unfolded for me. Poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, everything.
Outside the library, too--her friends, those who had magazine subscriptions, would give me stacks to read when they were through. Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal...all with fiction in them. I read them cover to cover, fiction and nonfiction. My step-grandmother delivered the previous year's National Geographic in January: I read them all. I read my mother's books, and the few books salvaged from her father's library (long and irrelevant story) and her friends' books (if they let me, which they sometimes did) and their children's books. I fairly wallowed in reading, in books. Many weren't very good. Many were excellent. I remember very clearly the shock of delight when I first found "The Maltese Cat" (Kipling, for those who haven't read it) in a collection of horse stories and knew instantly it was five cuts above the rest. It gave me shivers. So the range of quality was actually, all by itself, educational (and without a teacher telling me what my reaction should be.)
It was an era, as well, when book banning and burning were not at all popular: banning and burning books, shutting down presses, was something that happened in non-free societies:
E
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34556 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 03:12 |
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Diane in MN
Messages: 2732
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
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Like EMoon, I was lucky in having parents who did not censor my reading (barring a couple of historical novels that my mother said I had to wait to read until I was twelve), and also in having a brother four years older who came back from the library with books I liked. I grew up in a small town with an I-know-everyone librarian who, on a couple of occasions, wouldn't let me check out certain books*, but while our little library--which was at that time in a house, not a purpose-built building--shelved its collection in different rooms, there was never any attempt to confine kids to the children's room. I read pretty much anything I wanted from the time I was seven or eight years old, and resented greatly anyone telling me that something was "too old for me". Looking at the reasons for challenging the books on the various lists Robin linked to, that's still a favored reason for some people to want to take books out of libraries. ::HEADDESK HEADDESK HEADDESK:: Kids become readers by reading, and if they're prevented from reading anything that someone thinks is difficult or challenging or, heaven help us, mature, they're likely to find books pretty dull and reading not worth the effort. We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home; I suppose most of these book banners would have liked to lock it up too, because there's a lot of difficult, challenging, and mature stuff to be found in an encyclopedia if you start reading it. I liked reading ours. 
* The only one whose title I remember was Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse. Not that I cared about Perry Mason (who was on television in those days), but it had a horse in the title.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34561 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 06:00 |
amethyst nightstar
Messages: 5
Registered: May 2010 |
Junior Member |
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Those cheap cracks at Twilight really irritated me, I have to say. Mostly because they beg the question of who decides what is bad... as many have already pointed out here, getting young people reading at all (especially in a world with so many distractions from reading) is no mean feat, so if they are going to read their way through a four-book series voluntarily, why should we stop them? Besides which Twilight oculd lead to better books (like Sunshine). And though Twilight is not necessarily a great book, I don't think it is entirely without merit - if I was in charge of saying what should be banned for being 'bad' I would put Harry Potter right at the top of the list as I find it completley unreadable, but many love it, so my whole point is that no one should be telling anyone what is or isn't 'good'. (Kind of what Peter was getting at in 'Defense of Rubbish')
Sorry, bit of a rant there!
In other comments, I do think that if kids are going to be allowed the run of a library (which is great), it is important that there is information out there that flags up to parents which books they may want to investigate for themselves before letting their kids read them, in the same way that film certification works - a parent can still let there child watch a 15 if they like, but they know from the certificate that it might not be suitable and make that decision for themself. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the librarian being the one to note to parents when their kid has taken out a 'dubious' book.
Also, seconding the cry of why would anyone want to ban HERO and SWORD?
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34565 is a reply to message #34561 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 08:41 |
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Robin
Messages: 6006
Registered: September 2008
Location: England |
Senior Member
[Hellgoddess] |
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You and radilibrarian are right about TWILIGHT, of course. Cheap jokes are . . . cheap. But I am going to go on insisting that the likelihood of it doing harm seems to me at least nearly as great as the likelihood of it creating readers who will go on to read other things. Because the books you read *do* influence you. And the gender politics of TWILIGHT horrify me.
PS: And yes about there being info for parents and teachers. This is (as I keep saying) why DEERSKIN and SUNSHINE were published as adult. Not that there aren't far more gruesome and graphic books, but these were books written by the same person as wrote BEAUTY and won both a Newbery and a Newbery Honor back in the old days. (This is also why this is more or less a family blog, and I say 'frell' a lot.) My problem begins when the information is there but people don't take it. It's the lack of RESPONSIBILITY that makes me want to bang heads together. It's my job to WRITE THE STORY. It is NOT my job to make it suitable for fifth graders. It is the job of those responsible for the fifth graders to decide what it is SUITABLE for them to read. I'm basically of the freedom-of-the-library attitude myself, but it does vary with the kid, and I *do* sweat the precocious kids who write to me having just finished HERO and SWORD and are looking forward to SUNSHINE. If I had a dollar for every time I've said 'how about if you wait till you're 13, or at least ask a grown up who knows you to look at it first' I could stop worrying about finishing the work on Third House. I've actually been braced for the wave of angry letters in the wake of SUNSHINE's official YA edition, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because there *are* so many more graphic books out there than there were even eight years ago when SUNSHINE first came out--or nearly thirty, when SWORD and HERO did.
Lack of responsibility is one of the places censorship comes from. If all the books out there are anodyne, nobody has to bestir themselves to pay attention to what their kids are reading. Grrrr. (This is obviously not the only source of censorship. But it's one of them.)
[Updated on: Tue, 28 September 2010 08:51]
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34582 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 18:24 |
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Melissa Mead
Messages: 991
Registered: October 2008
Location: Albany, NY, USA |
Senior Member |
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I'm trying to remember if there was anything my parents forbade me to read. I don't think so. They believe in learning about things and discussing them. Of course, I was a timid child who naturally avoided anything at all scary or violent. They let my sister read Stephen King in her early teens, though, and she turned out fine.
(If anything, they encouraged me to read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow so I could get over my phobia of the Headless Horseman. And I mean phobia. I wouldn't go anywhere near the "I" shelf of the library.)
[Updated on: Tue, 28 September 2010 18:27]
Member of Carpe Libris: http://carpelibris.wordpress.com/
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34587 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 21:23 |
skating librarian
Messages: 571
Registered: October 2008
Location: Vermont |
Senior Member |
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I'm a retired elementary school librarian and have had my share of experiences with folks wanting to ban books ... and please, please don't expect librarians to monitor individual kid's reading!
First off, someone who has an MLS and is struggling to teach information literacy to 400 kids, AND to inspire in them an appreciation for books and so forth, AND to help 60 teachers and other staff locate materials needed to teach the curriculum, AND generally filling days and nights with more tasks than time allows, could not also be responsible for monitoring the things an individual child checked out.
With thousands of books (videos, audio books, pieces of software,and so on) and at least a couple hundred parents, each with different standards for his or her children, the task is impossible. Add to that the requirement in most library's policies and procedures that the staff carry out the aims put forth in ALA's Freedom to Read Statement ... it would have been against School Board policy for us to "tattle " to parents. Moreover, in Vermont it is state law that it is illegal to tell others what someone checks out from a library.
Consider the case of the gay student who is trying to figure out what is driving his or her attraction to others of the same gender ... he or she has the right to accurate information, no matter what his or her parents think. What about the child who is being abused, living with an alcoholic or addicted parent ... should that parent be able to restrict access to the information which might save the child's life?
I am not making this up. I knew those children and I made sure that my library had the information they needed. I never forced it on any of them, but I made sure that it was there, as well as information on skate boarding, writing poetry, Islam, and the Constitution.
Banned Book Week is also about the right of everyone, no matter what their age, to decide what they need to know. And no, I didn't stock information on bomb making or bank robbing, but then the kids never asked for it, and I don't know what I would have done if they had asked for it ...
And the point is moot these days, as they would just look it up the Internet.
It's hard enough to be a good librarian without being expected to be a censor too.
And quite honestly, I would have quit being a librarian before I would be a censor.
I know I am probably preaching to the choir, but it seems so few people understand what it is a professional librarian does, that I feel compelled to shed a little light .
"Winning a war is like winning an earthquake" Jeanette Rankin
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34591 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 01:02 |
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danceswithpahis
Messages: 380
Registered: October 2008 |
Senior Member |
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Looking back, I can only think of a handful of occasions when my parents told me not to read a particular book; generally they would try and influence my reading by purchasing books they thought I'd like rather than by forbidding books they thought would be too much for me. And looking at my nephews, I've seen the same thing with them. Their parents have told them a handful of times, "You need to wait to read this book until you're older," mostly in response to specific issues they'd seen their kids having while reading (the main one being, "This book is too scary for you right now, so let's wait a year or two," because of the way the boys reacted to other books they read [and yes, a year or two later they did read those other books and were able to enjoy them then]).
The thing with banned books lists is, as everyone knows, what else could be more enticing than a whole list of BANNED BOOKS?? Obviously if they're banned, they must be interesting! I remember going over some of these lists and picking out books to read; in particular I always remember "The Goats" by Brock Cole (which I more or less enjoyed, although it's been long enough that I only remember sporadic details by now). Perhaps it's time to go celebrate my freedom to read again.
"Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!"
-- Lilo ("Lilo and Stitch")
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34600 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 13:26 |
Inkwell
Messages: 68
Registered: September 2010
Location: UK |
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The idea of actually banning books is anathema to me, and this interesting discussion has had me scratching my head in bewilderment. Growing up in the UK, I was never aware of my local library banning anything, and I could take out whatever I wanted. That afforded me the privilege of being completely baffled by Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene at the tender age of 12! My parents approved of reading, luckily, because books provided an essential refuge from a difficult home life. At school, the problem simply didn't arise: in the 70s and 80s our school library was permanently locked and we had no librarian, because the school had no money.
In 1984 Ursula le Guin wrote an interesting essay, 'Whose Lathe?', collected in 'Dancing at the Edge of the World'. Her novel 'The Lathe of Heaven' was subject to a censorship hearing in that year. In the essay she discusses the idea of censorship itself, and also the insidious ways in which it happens. She has written since about censorship of books in the US - especially "literature of the imagination", as she terms it - and I heard her mention the problem yet again last year when she was interviewed by China Mieville on BBC radio.
Here's one just one quotable thought from 'Whose Lathe?'.
The censor says: You don't know enough to choose, but we do, so you will read what we choose for you and nothing else. The democrat says: The process of learning is that of learning how to choose. Freedom isn't given, it's earned. Read, learn, and earn it.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34603 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 17:08 |
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L.R.K.
Messages: 1081
Registered: October 2008
Location: Sweden |
Senior Member |
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Well, I've been thinking about this, and, really, the only person who censored what I read was... me. And I did. For instance, the girls in my class in "gymnasiet" (we were around 16-17? I'd imagine), were reading a series of books that to me sounded not only improper but... just simply boring. So I never read them. (The first one took place mainly in an attic.... )
And the library staff never restricted my reading - and were quite willing to get me books on inter-library loan even when I was quite young. (I've worked at libraries since where the policies have been much less generous in this regard.) I especially remember a Swedish version of "Little Dorrit" - the edition I got was in four volumes and printed in the 1920s.
Movies, though, were another matter. Like the movie Sholay (Flames) comes to mind, which was considered far too violent for me. (I forget at which age.)
Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean, like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34604 is a reply to message #34534 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 17:23 |
judith
Messages: 246
Registered: October 2008
Location: United States |
Senior Member |
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| Quote: |
I can’t remember if TANGO made it into Days in the Life proper, but I remember there was a lively forum discussion about it a year ago because at that point I hadn’t heard of it, and my reaction was, What?
I particularly like flashlightworthy’s* comment on this one:
Tango the baby penguin and his two dads must be sad to have slipped from the #1 slot to #2 over the last year. The reason for requested removal? Homosexuality. Yes, apparently gay flightless waterfowl pose a serious threat to the moral fiber of our nation. On the other hand, it’s good to know that our society has become more tolerant of non-traditional penguin families.
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I don't remember if I said this during last year's discussion or not, but if I did, it still bears repeating. "And Tango Makes Three" is a great little book. Pick it up -- the illustrations are great, and the story is cute beyond words. It's about two male chinstrap penguins who pairbond and want to hatch an egg together at the Central Park Zoo. With the help of one of the zookeepers, they realize their dream.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34606 is a reply to message #34605 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 19:39 |
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L.R.K.
Messages: 1081
Registered: October 2008
Location: Sweden |
Senior Member |
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| Maren wrote on Thu, 30 September 2010 00:01 |
| L.R.K. wrote on Wed, 29 September 2010 17:08 |
For instance, the girls in my class in "gymnasiet" (we were around 16-17? I'd imagine), were reading a series of books that to me sounded not only improper but... just simply boring. So I never read them. (The first one took place mainly in an attic.... )
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Flowers in the Attic? Salaciously read by teenagers the world over, apparently. I never read it either, but I remember it being passed around at my high school.
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Of course.
Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean, like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.
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| Re: Banned Books Week. Sigh. [message #34611 is a reply to message #34600 ] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 20:36 |
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Robin
Messages: 6006
Registered: September 2008
Location: England |
Senior Member
[Hellgoddess] |
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There was a time when Le Guin was pretty much a solitary voice in a wilderness: the only person who insisted on *keeping* her genre cooties even when Great Literature wanted to crush her to its mean little bosom. Go Le Guin.
I was going to say though . . . possibly totally destroying my own credibility . . . I'm not sure I *would* say I would NEVER ban a book. Someone said this on my FB page and I thought, um, wait a minute. I DON'T know where the lines are, but I would say (as I said on FB) that in a society, as opposed to 'an' anarchy, there are ALWAYS lines, eventually--by definition of society, which is at least nearly synonymous with compromise. Compromise is a ratbag. But . . . the example I suggested last night was a story about sexual abuse of children, done in a titillating way. I would ban this, yes. The problem is who is going to decide if that *is* what it's about and whether it *is* done in a titillating way.
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