Banned Books Week Day 5: What harm can a book do?

People say we're a more violent culture than we used to be.  Thinking like this tends to tick me off.  I don't remember attending a crucifixion lately, or watching Christians be fed to the lions, dropping my imperfect Spartan baby off a cliff, or drawing and quartering someone, so on, so on, so on.  Since the first caveman clubbed another one, humanity has been violent.   Hell, the world is pretty violent.  Baby sharks eat each other in the womb.  Have you ever watched that Meerkat Manor show?  They're like crime bosses.  So much for "nature is innocent."  


Let's not waste a lot of time here pretending that this is the generation that is going to destroy us all, because Socrates thought the youngsters of his time were going to destroy the world and we've had a pretty good run since then.


I'd be shocked if you haven't read this article by Meghan Cox Gurdon by now.
Cox Gurdon believes the YA has become too dark and that this newest generation is going to go to hell because they're reading about sparkly vampires instead of Nancy Drew.  According to her, YA is all "vampires and suicide and self-mutilation" and this is going to seriously psychologically impact our children.  We bookish types, especially those of us in YA, got up in arms about it and took to the internet to tear it apart.  There are a million good responses to it, like this one from Bookshelves of Doom.  This article is really maddening and I think the YA community has (rightly) said their piece on it, and the only reason that I'm bringing it up is that it seems to me a call to ban books.


Violence in a book is rarely used to advocate violence.  It's used to show struggle, evil, pain in the characters, and by doing that, show pain in this world.  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was banned this year.  The complainant had this to say:

“Twenty-four children are pitted in a life-or-death struggle with each other. The reason? Entertainment. That’s sick.  You guys don’t want Columbine, but you’re putting forth material that will totally desensitize the children to murdering other children.”

“What does that teach as far as honor?  What does that teach as far as ethics? Where is the moral lesson in this book that’s being shown to our children?”

For myself, I always took the moral of The Hunger Games to be Not to kill children.  That vanity, lack of education, and sensationalism will put a society on the path to become monsters, like those in the Capital.  Collins completely agrees with the complainant: children killing children for entertainment IS sick.  Every teen I know who has read The Hunger Games reached the same conclusion without needing it spelled out for him like an After-school special.  You don't get engrossed in a book, in a character you love, like Rue or Katniss, and come away from the story believing it was right to have done to them what happened in that book.  Here is another example of criticizing the content without the context, and underestimating our youth as you do so.

As always, parents should be reading what they're children are reading, making sure that their children are able to process what they're reading or seeing on television.  We'd like to give our children with a world less awful than the one we lived in but we just simply can't.  There are acts we perpetrate against our fellow man that are too horrible for me to understand as an adult and we can only hide them from our children for so long.  A story gives words, emotions, and life to a victim who might be just a name and a face on the news.  

I'm not an advocate for violence, but these banned books, with characters who are victims of violence, aren't either.

Check out Sheila from Book Journey's review on this "violent" banned classic and enter her Banned Books Week Giveaway: Here

Banned Books Week Day 2: Can a book make you have sex?

Some books Banned for being Sexually Explicit:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary – Banned for defining oral sex in Southern California in 2010.

 -A definition cannot be called “glorifying” sex, so here is an example of trying to squash knowledge of the act itself.  Will knowing of something’s existence alone make you want to do it? 

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Banned for its violence, which I’ll discuss later, but also its sexual content.  Does anyone who read this remember any sex in this book?  Finnick later mentions his sexual exploits in “Mockingjay,” but those aren’t even gone into explicit detail.  This one is a real head scratcher for me.

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier – Both banned for scenes containing masturbation.  I’ve never read a masturbation scene in literature that has “glorified” it.  I know that there are some who believe that masturbation is a horrible crime.  I disagree and am apt to believe that everyone tries it whether they read a book about it or not, or even know the word for it.

What’s Happening to My Body?  Book for Boys: A Growing-up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras and Dane Saavedra – How dare a book about sexual changes in boys define sex?  Next thing they’ll do is put the term “oral sex” in the dictionary.  Actually, the objectionable passages were the definitions of “rape,” “incest,” and “sexual assault.”  I really hope that parents don’t believe that just the knowledge of these words will make their children try it.  I also hope they don’t believe that by pretending that these things do not exist will make them disappear.

Crank by Ellen Hopkins – Banned for several reasons including it’s sexually explicit material, which in the case of this book is a rape.  Again, I should hope that parents don’t believe that the very knowledge of the existence of rape is dangerous.  Maybe you don’t what your child to know the darker parts of the world.  Problem is, part of passing into adulthood is learning about these things, and a book very well might be the safest way.  Would you rather they learned it from a movie or, God forbid, the internet?

I understand the desire to protect young people from adult topics; to keep the veil of childhood on a bit longer.  I’m an advocate of parents reading what their children read and helping them come to terms with it.  When books like this are banned from curriculum in schools, children and teens are denied the chance to work through these issues with their peers and a teacher.  And what about the kids who already know about sex and are trying to figure out their feelings on it.  As Sherman Alexie said about his childhood:

“They wanted to protect me from sex when I had already been raped. They wanted to protect me from evil though a future serial killer had already abused me. They wanted me to profess my love for God without considering that I was the child and grandchild of men and women who’d been sexually and physically abused by generations of clergy.”