In my post “Challenged Book: Bridge to Terabithia” I made a soap box statement with respect to the banning and/or challenging of books. I won’t restate it here in my own words, especially not when Clare Booth Luce said the same thing, only better: “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”
I’ve noticed that even a little blog like mine can stir up the winds of controversy when the idea of book banning is raised. If we censor conversations about censorship, we’ve lost every battle we’ve ever fought. I’ve dedicated the month of September on my blog to posts related to the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (September 25 to October 2, 2010).
I made this decision because it appealed to me. It isn’t complicated. I love books. I love freedom. I have enjoyed the freedom to read whatever I’ve wanted to read since I started reading sometime around the age of four. I learned to read because my father bowed to my demand for him to read my copy of Little Red Riding Hood over and over until I’d memorized every word in order. Then I matched the look of the word to the sound and – presto! – I was reading. No one every told me I couldn’t read a book, even when I made choices that ended up scaring the living daylights out of me. I also roamed freely through forests and ravines, alone. That is something you rarely see nowadays. Few children have that kind of freedom and I think libraries should make up for it by keeping a few wolves among the stacks. This is not to say that discernment and taste play no part in selecting reading material. But such decisions ought to be made at home and not in the public square, as Clare Booth Luce so aptly put it.
I was introduced to John Knowles’ American classic, A Separate Peace, by my husband, Chris, in the early days of our marriage (don’t worry, we’re still married 25 years later). He had had to read it in secondary school and loved it. I had never heard of it. It is now in my category of books I wish I had known as a youth/child. I’ve read it a few times and find greater depth in it each time, which is a testament to the power of the novel, not to my developing sentience. Ironically, I reread it this summer. When I found out that it ranks #67 on the ALA list of top 100 classics to be challenged, I felt the urge to post about it. It’s a brilliant, moving, disturbing story.
A Separate Peace is set in a New England boarding school for boys. As World War II rages on, two gifted boys, one an athlete, the other an intellectual, carry on with their studies and their friendship. As the concrete battles of the real war play out, Phineas and Gene engage in the kind of silent, one on one battles that are ignited by competition, jealousy, misunderstanding and a dose of paranoia. The result is tragic.
