Reading Whatever I Want in America

I’ve been working in libraries for 30 years or so now.  I’ve seen a lot of “Banned Books Weeks” come and go.  I’ve never felt completely comfortable with that name; I’m a stickler for word definitions.  So I’ve never been much for tooting the censorship horn during one week’s attention.  But this year a co-worker (and co-book group member) said something that’s made me ponder more about what it means to take risks in order to read.  One title our book group read and discussed was Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie.  This is a semi-autobiographical novel about young people who do risk their lives to read Western classic literature in China during the Cultural Revolution.  Another book I’ve read, Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi, spoke to the courage required in some places to read and to learn today. 

So I began to wonder about what leads governments (and/or theocracies) to ban books.  Don’t report me to the Board of Librarianship, but I did a little search on wikipedia and confirmed my previous notions; most banned books run afoul of officials for political reasons.  Thus, to list only a few examples, the U. S. S. R./Russia banned Doctor Zhivago, The Gulag Archipelago, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Rights of Man; Nazi Germany banned All Quiet on the Western Front and The Metamorphosis and the United States (or parts thereof) has seen fit to ban The Grapes of Wrath (California) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Southern states).  The Da Vinci Code was banned in Lebanon and Not Without My Daughter in Iran. And I’m not sure reading The Satanic Verses still might not be literally risky in Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Iran, Kenya, Kuwait, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Senegal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Thailand, some of the countries where this notorious book has been banned.

Other than politics, then sex and obscenity get books banned.  Some examples of titles banned in various places as obscene?  Brave New World, Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The God of Small Things, Howl, Naked Lunch, and the aforementioned Lolita.  

And, having also mentioned the Cultural Revolution, I didn’t know, prior to reading this wikipedia article, that China once banned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland due to its anthropomorphized animal characters.  You think that’s odd?  A public library I used to work for had to deal with one woman’s complaint that we shouldn’t have children's books containing talking animals because “that’s a lie.”  How lucky should I feel to have been born where this little bit of ignorance is one individual’s narrow-mindedness instead of a very large nation’s political precept?  Would I risk my life to follow Alice's white rabbit down his hole?

Of course many of the books we’ll see displayed during “Banned Books Week” this year will not have been really banned; they’ve been “challenged.”  Someone somewhere thinks he or she should decide what you or I (or, more likely, our children) get a chance to read.  No thanks, Would-Be Censor; I’m happy to make up my own mind.

If anyone is looking for a good banned/challenged book to read, here are a few I’d recommend:

• Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison
• Bridge to Terebithia, by Katherine Paterson
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
• Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
• The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

And I think I’ll re-read Alice’s adventures... because I can and because they’re wonderful.