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Don’t Read this Book!

Bill Tope

    When I was very young I read a novel, my first book. It was a grownup book, so I didn’t know all the words, but I had a dictionary at hand, so all was good. Then I read another. And another. I was soon reading every night, and not only novels, but short stories and essays, as well as non-fiction and magazines and newspapers. So moved was I by the written word that I scoured the backs of cereal boxes, lists of ingredients on product labels, you name it, just to be reading.
    So when my granddaughter came home the other day and remarked matter-of-factly that “another book has been banned” at her middle school, I was rather stunned. I suppose that it was the lack of outrage on her part that shook me the most. When I was young there was no such thing as banned books, I told myself, so why now? When I mentioned this to my daughter, she said that there were too banned books in my day, “Huckleberry Finn” came out in 1885, she told me, and was almost immediately prohibited in some jurisdictions. I ignored the jab on my age.
    This wasn’t a new phenomenon at all, she stated. Her school too had proscribed “Huckleberry Finn” and “1984” and “A Catcher in the Rye” and other of my beloved novels. When I said the word “beloved” she said oh yeah, Toni Morrison had been banned at school too. That was the book that my granddaughter had mentioned. Why didn’t you tell me about book banning at the time, I asked, baffled by her uncharacteristic silence. Oh, she said, you probably had your nose stuck in a book. I stared at her. Besides, she said more honestly, she hadn’t wanted to be embarrassed at school by her weird father. I nodded my understanding.
    I did some research into book banning and discovered, to my horror, that not only Twain, Salinger and Orwell had been summarily dismissed from libraries and school curricula, but also Steinbeck, Hemingway, Nabakov, Huxley and Joyce and Fitzgerald; even Charles Darwin had felt the axe, for his ground-breaking scientific volume, “On the Origins of Species.”
    There have been myriad reasons propounded by the Book Police: racial, sexual, religious, security, parenting; however, it all boils down to one driving force—politics. Governments are elected, school boards are elected, in some odd municipalities even the village librarian is elected (like meatloaf-flavored Popsicles, a disaster in the making).
    What can be done by those who oppose censorship in our schools and libraries? One thing is to stay apprised of what’s happening in your schools and libraries. Voice your opinions, loudly if you must. A second thing is to stay in touch with the Office for Information Freedom (OIF), an offshoot of the American Library Association.. A third way is to participate in the activities of Banned Books Week, held in late September of each year. Also, don’t be swayed by propaganda promoting book-banning; but stay attentive to the propaganda promulgated here. And finally: read, read, read, anything and everything you want—Insist on it!

 

    Originally published in the venerable (Alton, Illinois) Telegraph



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