Banned Books

    Last week was Banned Book Week. 

    Just the idea of banning books is anathema to me, even though I kind of get it. Words are powerful. Sometimes I think my life might have been different if I hadn't read Wuthering Heights. Was I looking for Heathcliff all those years? Bad idea, as Catherine knew, too.

    As far as I know, Wuthering Heights has never been banned, which just goes to show you that (1) you can't ban all the dangerous books, and (2) the people who ban books don't know what they're doing. I understand the objections to The Handmaid's Tale. It's a dangerous book. It'll make you think, and thinking is dangerous. 

    But Huckleberry Finn? Harry Potter? Where the Wild Things Are and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble? Reading a list of banned books can be as hilarious as it is dismaying.

    Florida banned more books in 2024-25 than any other state (2,304 instances). Texas comes in second (1,781 instances), Tennessee third (1,622). The Grants Pass School District banned All Boys Aren't Blue for LGBTQ content and Lucky for discussions of rape. Sex and gender seem to be the most frightening content for people who are frightened by books.

    Many banned books were National Book Award winners, like Sherman Alexie's young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. That's a terrific book. I recommended it to my pre-teen granddaughter, but now I see that it has been banned for dealing with "sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, and offensive language." As though young readers don't know about those things already. As though reading about how one very bright boy deals with them isn't a way for young readers to understand their own relationship to those things. As though the empathy stirred by the book isn't part of the experience.

    It goes both ways, though. A friend was recently suggesting we have a silent-film festival at the Holly Theater in Medford, including The Birth of A Nation. Whoa! That's a detestable film! Is it a good idea to show a blatantly racist, pro-Ku Klux Klan movie in today's political climate? If I were on the committee I would vote against it. But I'm not a film scholar. Another committee member might vote for it because it is a technically brilliant work. It's like someone saying I shouldn't teach Lolita for its horrific theme of pedophilia. But I am a literature scholar, and I know what a brilliant novel Lolita is. Both works of art are technical masterpieces that make us think about important issues. (The difference is that Griffith was on the side of the racist ideas, whereas Nabokov was in no way advocating Humbert Humbert's horrifying treatment of Lolita.)

    Don't read this, don't read that. This book is dangerous; that book is dangerous. Ban it, ban the next one, and the next. 

    But it's impossible to ban all the books that stimulate thinking, understanding, and empathy. Whack-a-mole.