Why "Banned Books" is an Oxymoron

I love to talk about my criminal behavior as a teenager. Defying authority. Sneaking around. Breaking the rules.

You know, reading.

I was encouraged to read at home. But my parents couldn't keep up with my appetite for books so I got many of them at the library. My mother got me started on Judy Blume sometime around age 13 or 14 and I wanted to ready everything she had written. If you have read her young adult novel Forever, you know why she has been popular with book banners and not so popular with librarians. When I couldn't find it on a library shelf, I was told that it had been "removed" because it wasn't "appropriate reading."

Well, of course, I had to read it, then.

I drove to the nearest public library and found it perched on a shelf like a gleaming jewel, full of salacious promise. I glanced right and left (for what, I couldn't tell you), snatched it down, and sat right there in the floor. I think I read the whole thing right there between the BLs and BRs. I certainly didn't learn anything that would turn me into a trollop but the story deals with topics that all teenagers think about, even if they don't necessarily experience them.

Since then, I've been a fan of the ALA's Top Ten Banned Books List, which I consult as much as the NYTimes Bestsellers.  We writers can only hope to be on that list one day. It's got to be good for sales. Because what book banners haven't figured out is the universal human desire to discover what they don't want us to know.

Put that desire into the hearts of teenagers and you have the perfect storm for a surge in literacy.

Many readers are celebrating the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, now a classic, widely taught, and still on the Banned Books list at #3 for 2011. That is perhaps Harper Lee's greatest achievement with this book, because the work dares to challenge ideologies that still infect our society. Revealed through the innocent perspective of a child, the story exposes some of the ugliest warts in human nature.

Book banners hate that.

I've recently read about Lauren Myracle, whose YA books written in texting language make her, as one reviewer suggested, "American's Most Hated Author.

Myracle's characters do the unthinkable: they use what many think of as "bad grammar." (Ask any linguist; there's no such thing.) They speak in texting language. They have potty mouths. They think about contraception and go to parties. In short, these are not our Laura Ingalls Wilders or Anne of Green Gables. Yet, even though those characters lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries, some people still believe girls should sound and behave that way in fiction. Myracle says if her readers learn valuable lessons from watching her characters make mistakes, then she has accomplished something positive.


She has the coveted #1 spot on the Banned Books List this year, guaranteeing a spike in sales. I'd say she's accomplished something positive.

And then there's The Hunger Games which, frankly, I was surprised to see at # 3. Katniss is a young woman who has to step into her father's role when he is killed in the mines. She learns to hunt and gather, and she is deadly with her bow and arrows, skills that will serve her well when she is forced into the Hunger Games, a fight to the death. Her reality is difficult: her government of Panem is shockingly brutal in its treatment of children but most horrifying of all is how the hunger games are glorified--an Olympic-like tradition that celebrates turning children into gladiators who must fight until only one is left alive.

Maybe its the raw brutality that bothers the book banners. Should children read about children being hungry or dying? Or maybe kids shouldn't read about tyrannical governments and crazy dictators who invent traditions to remind citizens that they shouldn't revolt. Should children read about the exploitation of environmental resources? Because goodness knows you don't see it on the evening news.

Worse, perhaps girls shouldn't read about a girl who can hunt, who is able to best her attackers. It might give us crazy notions, like reading banned books.

Or maybe even writing one.