It’s Banned Books Week, which means two things.
People are going to recommend that certain books be wiped off the face of the earth.
Also, other people are going to fall over themselves to find these books, add them to their collections and find out what all the fuss is about.
Librarians have been chastised, fired and threatened because they dare to keep banned books on the shelves, and some even go so far as to put them on display addressing what the fuss is all about. Now, bookstores and online sites like Thriftbooks and Amazon are advertising banned books for sale. The effort to make books disappear is going down in flames.
You’d be amazed at what has made the banned books list throughout history. More common themes today are LGBT literature, those that address race, etc., but I think some folks would be surprised to find there are a lot of other reasons that people have pushed to get specific books off the shelves.
Here are some examples:
• Mark Twain is known as the greatest humorist produced in the United States, and two of his books are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His pair of books followed the exploits of two young boys in the 19th century, but they drew the ire of some people because of coarse language, racial stereotypes and the use of the N-word.
• The entire series of Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling is on the banned list. The series is about a boy wizard with a special destiny to stop an evil being named Voldemort from rising up and taking over the world. Rowling’s books are being boycotted today because of the author’s transphobic remarks, but when the books first came out, they were banned for glorifying witchcraft and being seen as anti-family.
• Anne Frank is known in the history books as a young girl who hid with her family from the Nazis during Germany’s occupation of the Netherland for over two years before being captured in 1944 and dying from typhus in a concentration camp in 1945. Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl is a story everyone should read, but critics want the book banned because it discusses puberty and teenage sexuality.
• Robert Newton Peck wrote a semi-autobiographical tale in 1972 about a boy coming of age on a Vermont farm called A Day No Pigs Would Die. The book, which has been deemed the first designated as a young adult novel, makes references to the slaughter of animals and animals mating. Peck once said that “the brutal truths of farm life survival are quite beautiful.”
• We all know author Roald Dahl for enticing a reader’s sweet tooth with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but he’s also famous for writing James and the Giant Peach, which centers on an orphan boy who enters a magical peach and goes on adventures with magically altered garden bugs. The supernatural themes and references to drug use make this book a target.
• When I was in school, one of the books they had us read Lord of the Flies by William Golding. This book walks the line between civility and chaos after a group of young British boys are stranded on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves but then resort to savagery to maintain control. The book has obscene language, violence and cruelty to animals, which is why some want it banned.
• One of my favorite books in childhood was Charlotte’s Web, written by E.B. White and published in 1952. The story follows a pig named Wilbur and a barn spider named Charlotte who writes words of praise about the pig to keep him from being slaughtered. The reasoning for banning the book? Silly rabbit—animals can’t talk. That’s against God’s design. Also, the slaughtering of pigs is considered disturbing to young children.
• Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God almost 90 years ago, which chronicled Janie Crawford, a fictional teen girl who was vibrant, yet voiceless and became a woman who controls her own destiny. Just like J.K. Rowling, Hurston’s political views make her books be seen as written with a poisoned pen.
• Christians everywhere follow the Holy Bible as a product of divine inspiration, but that has also been banned in spite of selling over 5 billion copies throughout history. Religious viewpoints and violence are the talking points of the banners.
It’s easy to look on shelves in bookstores and in your own home and discover there are books that people feel threatened by. There are plenty of other books I could hold up as examples, but in my view, if a book has a bad reputation, that makes it a good reason to buy it. Maybe you’ll like it, and maybe you’ll hate it, but if it’s the latter, saying it should be banned will just make the public crave it more.
Buy now.
