Thoughts on Banned Books Week

It is currently Banned Books Week, during which time we are encouraged to read… wait for it… banned books, i.e., books that some censorial power somewhere in the country has pulled from libraries or bookstores or curricula.  Curmie, as you might have guessed, Gentle Reader, has read a fair number of such titles, but he admits to not having read anything on the American Library Association’s list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024 or PEN America’s list of the Most Banned Books of the 2024-25 School Year.  He has, for what it’s worth, encountered a couple of the titles in a different form: as a play or film.

Curmie did get an email from Early Bird Books, listing about 40 books that have been banned somewhere at some point in time.  Curmie’s read about a half dozen of them, and encountered a couple others through film versions or extended excerpts.  A couple of those he has read leave him scratching his head about how anyone could possibly find anything in those books objectionable.  But however much Curmie likes to think of himself as creative or imaginative, he just can’t seem to settle into the censorial mentality.

There are, to be sure, a lot of bans: the ALA comes in with the smaller number, at 2,452 (!) unique titles; PEN America counts total challenges, so a book challenged by ten different libraries counts as one on the ALA list and ten on PEN America’s.  And, per the ALA website, “Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the data compiled by ALA represent only a snapshot of censorship attempts in libraries.”  The two organizations also track the bans a little differently: PEN America concentrates exclusively on new bans, so a book that continues to be banned counts on the ALA list but not PEN America’s.

Any way you look at it, Gentle Reader, the censors are out there, and they’re organized.  According to the ALA, 

The 2024 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organized movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries. Parents only accounted for 16% of demands to censor books, while 5% of challenges were brought by individual library users. [emphasis in original]

Given all this, it’s certainly understandable to see various forms of persuasion employed to get us all to read (specifically) banned books this week.  And whether it’s a metaphorical monodigital salute to the censors or simply a little smug naughtiness, there are some positive vibes associated with joining the parade to read a banned book this week.

But for all the fact that Curmie appreciates symbolic action as much as the next fella, there’s still something a little disquieting about the process.  Some of the books on the list are there for totally bogus reasons, but for others, we can at least see a rationale: “think of the children” is a catch-all rallying cry for anything the Puritans don’t like, but it isn’t necessarily a bad idea to keep explicitly sexual content, for example, out of the hands of elementary school kids… or, the internet being the internet, at least not contributing to placing it there.

Of course, a good share of the brouhaha generated by the right has to do with the LGBTQ+ community, and the fact that kids start wondering about their own identities in this regard long before they reach maturity in either legal or developmental terms.  A disproportionate share of the banned books feature young characters asking those questions about themselves: and their target audience is at least two generations younger than Curmie. 

Similarly, some people would have us forget that racism, sexism, and other forms of xenophobia exist.  And, of course, one person’s heroic lone wolf standing up against an oppressive regime is someone else’s anti-American insurgent.  Those of us who remember the Civil Rights campaign and Vietnam era don’t need a reminder, or at least not as much of one, but today’s university freshmen weren’t even alive for 9/11, let alone remember it.  We have different life experiences and different expectations.

The point here is that adults, at the very least, should have ready access to what they want to read.  But isn’t that the point?  Pressure to read this book or that book because it’s been banned somewhere runs counter to this idea.  Yes, you’re taking a stand or whatever, but no one notices and no one cares, least of all the censors. 

If there’s a book on the list somewhere that interests you, then by all means buy it, read it, post about it if you want to.  But, as Curmie wrote last time, “especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.”  The same applies to things that serve some purpose other than one’s own satisfaction.  If that’s you, too, Gentle Reader, go ahead and make your next book that horror story by someone other than Stephen King (the most banned author in the country), or that cozy mystery, or the biography of someone you just find interesting.  Or what you will.

Don’t get me wrong.  As Isaac Asimov famously said, a book worth banning is a book worth reading.  And there is something to be said for reading acclaimed books as an exercise in cultural literacy.  Curmie makes an effort to move such a book to the top of the reading list about every third or fourth book.  (The last such book he read was Love in the Time of Cholera, which has the added benefit of having been banned by some town in Maryland.)  But even as a theatre historian, Curmie has neither read nor seen about a half dozen Shakespeare plays, and isn’t the slightest bit ashamed of that fact.  King John?  Really?

If you want to read a banned book, go for it.  Don’t do so just because it was banned.  But if that makes it just a little more intriguing, so be it.  Enjoy, Gentle Reader.