I sat down in the train last Friday and found a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ wedged between the wall and the seat, spine-up. It looked so new I immediately thought, “Oh dang, some English 101 kid is going to be really ticked off when he gets to University station and realizes he left his book here.”
I pulled it out and was extremely surprised to find that it wasn’t a first-year text at all, but a free-range banned book!
There was a sticker on the front that informed me (and yes, I wanted to photograph this instead of transcribing it, but I haven’t seen my camera in weeks):
FREE A CHALLENGED BOOK!
Did you know that someone in Canada is trying to stop you from reading certain books?
Are you shocked?The book you are holding in your hands has faced a challenge or ban.
It has been freed by a citizen concerned about freedom of expression who would love to know your thoughts.
PLEASE RELEASE ME
We invite you to visit www.freedomtoread.ca to learn more about censorship.
Then there were some instructions on how to report the book on the Bookcrossing site.
And I was like, How great is this? So I hit up the Freedom to Read site as per instructions and was extremely surprised to find that right here in Canada, libraries are banning books that – in my humble opinion, which apparently counts for very little in the world of censorship – are about as innocuous as fat-free yogurt. (To see what I mean, look at the banned book list (pdf). I know, right?)
I am anti-censorship. I would be anti-censorship even if I hadn’t been writing what would have surely been banned books at a stupidly young age. I would be anti-censorship even if my shelves weren’t full of miraculous and controversial Soviet literature. (The Russians, they know censorship. We have no idea in comparison.) I am of the opinion that if it’s written, it was written to be read. (Whether it should be included in public curriculum or not is a subject for endless debate, of course, given my general thoughts on the public school system. But you know how it is. A kid that wants to read will read, and he will find and read banned books regardless of the venue.)
And I think kids need to be exposed to banned books – anything and everything, controversial histories of false events, all the old propaganda, the racist names and idiotic stereotypes, all that. Kids need to be challenged so that they can join the discussion and the debate. Why did people think that this was OK? Why do we no longer think that? What are some ways that we can show that this is wrong, or hurtful, or hateful, or scary, or true? What are some ways we can stand up against this? These are questions kids can’t ask if they’re being fed a steady diet of inoffensive literary pablum.
So I will come clean now and admit that I have never read ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ nor do I know why it was once on a banned or challenged list. I look forward to finding out before I release this book back into the wild.
Readers, thoughts on censorship? Hate speech? Which banned books have you read and loved and/or hated?
Catcher in the Rye – Dreadfully boring piece of work that is interesting only when you find out that it was a banned book.
Naked Lunch – Should be censured from public schools and be placed in restricted sections of libraries. I’d rather not have a young child find this book and use it to push the buttons of uptight teachers and family.
Censoring I’ve performed:
Deleted various comments on my blog, which were made by spam bots.
I’ve given the thumbs-down on social news sites like digg and reddit, which can eventually cause the comment to go invisible, which effectively censures the comment.
I was recently forced to throw a few of my old study guides into the recycling pile as no one wanted to take them off our hands. I was guilt ridden as it felt like I was participating in a book burning.
Free-range banned books, what a great idea! Though I can’t help but wonder how many are stagnating in lost-and-found boxes because someone couldn’t be bothered to read the sticker…
Also, I love the art deco illustration on A Farewell to Arms.
Corey: oh thank God, I thought I was the only one who thought ‘Catcher in the Rye’ was pretentious crap. I wanted to smack Holden Caulfield upside the head about one in every three sentences.
Naked Lunch: OK, I’d maybe remove it from public schools, but I don’t think it needs to be locked up in public libraries. It really needs to be read in context with the other Beat literature for you to see what the impact was and kind of where it fits in the whole scene. (Uh, daddy-O. Don’t be such a square.)
Mark: I know, it’s a cool idea right? Too bad most people will be so apathetic about the cause.
Count me among the apathetic. Libraries aren’t obliged to carry a copy of every book in existence. The selection process will always be subjective, and opinions will vary. If that was the extent of censorship in this country, then I’d be happy.
Of course, it’s not; one example being customs and their obscenity confiscations.
“Libraries aren’t obliged to carry a copy of every book in existence.”
True, but neither should a library be obliged to remove books that it already has on the shelves because one patron complains that the book promotes an “anti-establishment view,” for instance. (And that was a poetry anthology!)
I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I’ve explained myself fully.
A library is a certain size, and books are a certain size. Books continue to be introduced. Thus, the library must do a combination of (a) expand, (b) not obtain every new book, and/or (c) remove certain books from the collection. I think no one is proposing that only (a) is acceptable. Both (b) and (c) will require someone to exclude books from the library.
So, who gets to decide? If you say, ‘patrons’, you get what you are calling ‘censorship’. If you say, ‘the librarians’, then that’s just a government committee dictating their taste in literature, which many wouldn’t like either. If you were to select things randomly, then everyone would presumably be equally unhappy with the result.
What I see here is a system that limits library patron’s access to information no matter how you arrange it. The system’s limitations will disproportionally affect minors and those of lower income, but this is not the only nor the worst example of systematic discrimination against these groups in our society.
As an add-on, I object to the watering-down of terms like ‘censorship’. But I recognize that I’m a prescriptive fuddy-duddy, and that in the absence of an environment where distribution or possession of materials is punished, people will start to apply ‘censorship’ to the actions of public libraries and blog owners.
“So, who gets to decide? If you say, ‘patrons’, you get what you are calling ‘censorship’. If you say, ‘the librarians’, then that’s just a government committee dictating their taste in literature, which many wouldn’t like either. If you were to select things randomly, then everyone would presumably be equally unhappy with the result.”
A very good point, and actually, I had never previously thought of how libraries start off their book collections and decide which new books to buy every year. I assume it’s a combination of patron requests and best-seller lists or something. Though for children and young-adult literature, it also appears that they do a lot of their buying based on the yearly awards/medals (Newbery, Caldecott, etc).
I would totally go to a library whose collection consisted only of Nobel prize winners. So wonderfully pretentious!