Day 7: I Checked Out a Banned Book

At the beginning of the week, my friend posted a link to the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which took place the first week of October, and supports the freedom to express and encounter "unpopular and unorthodox ideas."  I decided to undertake my most rebellious* challenge yet and read a banned or challenged book.

Yesterday afternoon was grey but bright, and the sunlight still came through the tall windows of the third-floor reading room as I perused the stacks. As soon as I looked at the ALA's list of banned classics, I realized how many had been on our reading lists at school: I'd already read To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Call of the Wild (!?) and The Catcher in the Rye, as well as parts of Catch-22 and Beloved. My trip down the stacks was, however, the first time I'd picked up a book specifically because it had been challenged.

I spent several uncomfortable minutes in the stacks. Although I wanted to choose a book that would broaden my perspective, I couldn't, for example, bring myself to pick up Lolita. It may be a "profound meditation on the meaning of love," as its jacket attests, but I just - see, I'm uncomfortable even writing about it. As I read the jacket, I found myself thinking, "Maybe this is obscene. Maybe some books should be banned." 

I struggled with Huckleberry Finn as well. This is the book that immediately comes to mind when I think of a banned classic, but I'm not sure what exactly about the book's portrayal of race relations makes it controversial. Was it too anti-slavery for its time? Or is it too insensitive and brash for our time? Or is it controversial in that in mentions race at all? I held the modern version in one hand and a reprint of the original in the other. If I read a sanitized version, what was the point, but on the other hand, if I selected the original version specifically because it hadn't been scrubbed of racial slurs, wasn't I being a bit sensationalist? So I put both versions back. 

I eventually left with two books I hadn't read before but interested me: Lord of the Flies and The Grapes of Wrath. 

HOW I LEFT MY COMFORT ZONE:

I was taken back to the debates we'd had in my introductory philosophy course about censorship, free speech, and obscenity when I considered Lolita. There might be a redeeming message in what, from my perspective, is a story about sexual abuse. Is portraying a sexual abuser as a protagonist obscene? I don't know. Should Lolita be banned or censored? No, I don't believe so. Should it be promoted? Maybe not - but if it's not, and no one reads it, does that amount to censorship? Hmm. So, uncomfortable.

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:

The freedom to read is a right. It is threatened by both censorship and illiteracy. I don't think it's a terribly novel idea that people who can't read don't have any power. Both censorship and illiteracy keep people from encountering ideas that could free them.

*I actually think I'm fairly rebellious, but I prefer my rebellion to come in more subtle ways.