Banned Books Week 2017

Banning books seems futile. Stupid, in fact. Banning may well validate the ideas in a book by marking those ideas as important and meaningful enough to ban. Trying to silence a work may make the entity look weak and afraid. Or censorship may make the book seem like forbidden fruit such that readers are all the more eager to read this mysterious morsel. Perhaps condemning books brings attention to a book that otherwise might just fade away due to lack of interest. And banning may engage those people who disagree with a book's sentiments, but will defend to the death the right of those sentiments to be heard.

The most common books bans are for being age-inappropriate. These are partial bans that restrict a book from people of a certain age or at an individual school, when people can still obtain the book, just not quite as easily. While it's worthwhile debating such books and the gray areas they create, probably a majority of people would agree that some books should be kept from some children; in our society we try to protect children. At least from sex. Usually we keep "dirty" books from children, such as Catcher in the Rye. In the past, we've also tried to protect adults from literature that's a little too sexy. This has happened with notable literature such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, Lolita, A Farewell to Arms, and even a poem, Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Today it seems unlikely that much is censored from adults for being too sexual, but the church will try, because religious censorship is another huge force in the world of book banning. After obscenity (too much sex), the next big category for religious censorship is blasphemy such as The Satanic Verses, Candide, and (believe it or not) Carrie, The Da Vinci Code, and Animal Farm. Even Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was censored for questioning the existence of God. But I could've written that as "god." Given the theocracies that still exist in the world, there's an overlap between religious and political censorship (see above, The Satanic Verses). The biggest political book banners are dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes. That means books like Animal Farm, Dr. Zhivago, The Master and Margarita, and probably anything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Yet even The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf have been forbidden in democratic countries. While there are other categories, one last common reason relates to "lifestyle," such as novels portraying homosexuality, drug use, or promiscuity -- a bewildering combination. I'll make no suggested reading for Banned Books Week, because every week is banned books week.  🐢