An Ode to Banned Book Week

Next week is Banned Book Week! This always gets me so excited. I think there are two reasons:

1. It’s an excuse to read. Because I, you know, need another one of those.

2. I’m a rebel. I’m not planning to track down a copy of Mein Kampf or anything, but reading a book that someone, somewhere, has deemed inappropriate makes me proud to be an American. Freedom of speech rocks.

I think that’s one of the really great things my parents did for my brother, my sister, and myself. Though our movies (The Goonies, The Sandlot, and Ghostbusters) and television (Saved by the Bell, Boy Meets World, and Home Improvement) were highly regimented—as in, we were not allowed to watch any of the aforementioned works—our reading standards were surprisingly lax. I was allowed to go into the tiny library in our town and leave with armfuls of books with almost no restrictions. I wasn’t allowed to read things like The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins, but I like to think that was on the lack of artistic merits of the books instead of the moral ones. Isn’t that right, mom? I’m pretty sure I’ve read every Newberry Award winner from 1959-1999. (‘69, ’78, ’81, and ’90 are some of my favorite books of all time.)

I love how provocative this kind of literature is. Not in the it’s-all-erotica sense of provocative, but in the makes-you-think kind of way. I will never forget the feeling I had when I first read Orwell’s 1984. Other than a personal tie to the year (it was a good year for bright, brunette girls to be born, they say) I knew it was a classic and I picked it up for some light, summer reading. I read it when I was lifeguarding at a pool that didn’t get a lot of swimmers. For three days, any time I wasn’t forced to be on the stand actually, you know, guarding lives, my nose was stuck in that book. When I got to that epic final line, I actually shouted, appalled that was how Orwell chose to end his stunning work or dystopian genius?! Was there nothing sacred!?

Immediately, I read the line again. I don't know, maybe I expected it to change somehow. Alas, it hadn’t, so I threw the book on the floor and it narrowly missed a puddle of pool-water.

Weeks later, I was still stewing on the ending when it finally hit me: that’s exactly what the writer intended. He wanted me to be bothered by the ending. He wanted me to think about what was controlling me in my own life. He wanted to make me mad at Big Brother and rise up to do something to change it. It all clicked, and suddenly, all of literature made sense to me in a way it never had before. Good books make you feel. They move you, they disturb you, they make you grateful for the people around you, and help you see things from a different perspective.

You don’t hear of a lot of book-banning these days (other than the occasional group of parents at some small school.) But what I love about banned book week is celebrating the diversity in literature. Most of these books have been banned for sexual or political content and I think that’s exactly why people should read them. To see the world from a perspective that is completely different than your own. So go ahead, pick up a banned book. Here are my recommendations:

• 1984
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower--nice and short and teenage-angsty
• Of Mice and Men--also short
• A Handmaiden’s Tale--very feministy
• Harry Potter--I'm sure you've read him unless you've lived under a rock for the last decade and a half, but I put him on every list of books I create, so...there's that.
• Or you could go crazy and track down an untained version of Huckleberry Finn simply becuase it's not socially acceptable.

I’m either picking up A Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451 because I'm a rebel like that.

Happy rebelling—I mean reading.