More Banned Books Week

by Michael

As Jim pointed out earlier this week, it’s time to celebrate those books that others have tried to silence. I’m excited by the response that readers and authors have had to the situation with Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and by the fact that the attention garnered by book-banning tends to help raise the profile of said book. While keeping a book out of a library or school is a terrible thing (especially an important and amazing book like Speak), I’m grateful that the ensuing controversy makes the book all the more prominent.

One of the bigger controversies of the past few months was the one surrounding Ellen Hopkins and the Humble, Texas Teen Lit Festival. When Ellen was “disinvited” from the festival, her fellow authors decided not to appear, and the festival was cancelled. It’s terrible for the teens who didn’t get to have the event. Representing teen authors, I’ve seen first-hand how important these authors are to the readers. I’ve seen more than one kid crying and thanking an author for what they’ve written, how their life has been changed for the better. It’s hard not to get emotional about the impact books can have. But it’s important to make a stand, and I hope the teens understood the difficult decision those authors made.

But, this post was really an excuse to link to Ellen’s fantastic Anti-Censorship “Manifesto,” which you can find here. It’s short, powerful, and well worth the read.

Banned Books Week

by Jim

Two things I love: controversy and online quizzes. As we kick off annual Banned Books Week, the Guardian has a quiz on the subject. I confess, I only got 7 of 12 right.

But it’s the Independent which has far more interesting things to say about Banned Books Week. As they note, it’s pretty easy to laugh off people who think Harry Potter will make kids Satanists or that Judy Blume will destroy the moral fabric of a nation. Boyd Tonkin, though, digs a little deeper and presents a list of ten books that make the question of book banning a little trickier: Holocaust deniers, pedophiles, racists…should they ever be banned? Or, a different way to look at it: do they deserve to be published?

For me, the latter question is infinitely more difficult to answer. Because I’m solidly on the side that no books should be banned. At the same time, there are plenty of titles I would never represent. Take Richard Howard’s Did Six Million Really Die? He had every right to publish it, but I wouldn’t have touched it in a hazmat suit. I’m curious whether that would make me, in a manner of speaking, complicit in the “banning” of books. I’m not saying I wouldn’t represent an author I don’t agree with—there are just different levels of disagreement, you know?

Would love to know your thoughts on the issue. And whether folks think they’d be able to work with authors they thought were reprehensible in order to make money on their books.


P.S.  Just after writing this, I learned that my very own client Richelle Mead has had her entire Vampire Academy series banned at a junior high in Texas. The most striking thing about this is that the sixth book in the series, Last Sacrifice, isn’t even out yet. So it’s been banned…in the future. Magical.

Censorship

by Chasya

A few days ago EW’s Shelf Life blog linked to the just released American Library Association’s list of top ten books most frequently challenged in 2009. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the list, their site explains that frequently challenged books are those that are formally, through written request, asked to be removed from a library’s bookshelf for inappropriate content.

I looked at the list for 2009 along with the 100 most frequently challenged books of the decade in astonishment. The 2009 list includes most notably, as EW points out, the Twilight series. It takes me back a while. In school we learned that The Catcher in the Rye was at one time censored, and I remember feeling incensed by the notion and proud that those days of narrow-minded censorship were over. But lo and behold, there, staring back at me at #6, was the 1951 Salinger classic. I was aghast to see other titles that shaped and influenced me in my youth on the list: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (#3) and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (#4). The list of 100 Banned/Challenged books were equally as shocking and included an all time favorite, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle (#90). It was just one among many, many others that I had read and loved as a child. And what was at #1 on the list of 100, you ask? Why it’s the one and only Harry Potter series—a contemporary classic that pretty much introduced a new generation to reading, period. Among the quibbles that they are arguing make the books on the list unsuitable are topics such as Satanism, objectionable religious viewpoints, offensive language and homosexuality. While I will say that it’s true that a book should be age appropriate, and that parents of young children should have the right to determine what that means individually, removing books from the shelves is not today, and has never been, an acceptable course of action. ALA Director Barbara Jones puts it perfectly when she says, “Protecting one of our most fundamental rights—the freedom to read—means respecting each other’s differences and the right of all people to choose for themselves what they and their families read.”

We learn and are shaped as people by learning about subject matter that exposes us to the harsher (or truer) realities of life. Some of the most important things I have learned about, I learned from reading books just like these. Many people would be appalled that To Kill A Mockingbird is still on the top ten list. As EW’s Catherine Garcia points out, the objection that it incites racism misses the point entirely. But even books that legitimately tackle subjects that some parents would want to shield their children from are beneficial to us in a way that we may not even know to appreciate. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (#65) is about war, sure. But few other things convey the heartbreak, the magnitude and the ramifications of it the way O’Brien’s words do. It is more than just about war—it’s about people, individuals. And the lessons I took from it were complex, eye-opening, and, dare I say, good for me. As someone who read a whole lot of stuff that was age inappropriate (the first time I became fully aware of sex and attraction it was in Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes, #87, I was 8), I can say that I don’t believe I turned out any worse for it. I felt armed with knowledge that the world was a bigger place, with more for me to learn than I was able to wrap my head around. And personally, I rather enjoyed unwrapping those layers of ignorance; it is much like the satisfaction I feel when peeling away the skins of a tightly wrapped onion.

What about you, readers? Which of these books were you surprised to learn people are objecting to?

The Leader Orders an Arrest

by Jessica

A week or two ago Rachel posted on censorship, which is always a hot-button issue, even among citizens of a country who generally agree that freedom of speech is a good thing, and are pleased to exercise it, in tones both civil and hysterical, as often as we can. Yet despite how absorbing questions relating to censorship and the first amendment can be, it can be eye-opening to look beyond our own borders, where limits on civil society (or even shrieking, rabid, partisan society) are far more onerous. And dangerous.

Earlier this month at the Cairo International Book fair, Egyptian security officials confiscated a novel entitled The Leader Cuts His Hair, and arrested its publisher on the grounds that the books insults Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi. The novel, written by the Egyptian novelist Idris Ali, looks at social conditions in Libya in the late seventies, a period during which Ali was living in Libya. Egypt has long outlawed books that cast aspersions at its own President, Hosni Mubarak, now in his 28th year in office, but I’m surprised that Qadhafi is afforded the same treatment. The Egyptian Writers Union protested the incident, calling it an embarrassment and a stain on the nation. Indeed, this is hardly the sort of behavior that will win the Cairo Book Fair—now the largest in the Arab world—the kind of international status that it quite deservedly seeks. Which is too bad, since the fair, which throws open its doors to thousands of publishing professionals and millions of Cairenes, is an experience to behold. Whole families make a day trip of the fair, and when not browsing the miles of bookstalls in search of bargains (take note, Strand Bookstore, home of “18 miles of books”), they picnic on the grounds. Between the ice-cream vendors and balloon sellers and the impromptu soccer matches are people of all stripes, laden with books. It’s a far cry from the trade oriented fairs at Frankfurt or London, but it’s a clear demonstration that the culture of the book is thriving—despite, as recent events again demonstrate, some very serious obstacles.

Censorship shmensorship

by Rachel

An article in the Guardian caught my attention this week regarding the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the banning of certain books. Alice Walker, John Updike and even Pablo Neruda are some of the authors whose books are banned from entering correctional facilities. Texan prison officials say that restrictions on reading material are for the good of everyone.

This got me thinking. The only reason I first picked up a copy of Lolita was because I’d heard it had once been banned. And this is precisely why I grabbed a copy of Madame Bovary when I was in the seventh grade and read it over a weekend. If you’re going to ban a book, there’s a good chance people will want to read it and will read it. Humans are inquisitive! Tell us something is bad or immoral, and we’ll need proof of that. So, we’ll stay up all night (I will, at least) reading banned or formerly banned books, trying to understand why a story has been censored.

I’m not sure I agree with books being banned anywhere. Some people might argue that certain books should be banned in prisons to avoid disrupting an inmate’s rehabilitation, but I’m not a fan of censoring ideas of any kind, whether people think it’s for the greater good or not.