Thought Banned

It’s Banned Books Week.

Virginia Lee, over at her amazing blog wrote about it and included a few links like this one to the Forbidden Library.

It was fascinating, in a chilling way, to read the titles of books that have been banned or challenged.

The Nazis burned Jack London’s The Call Of The Wild. I really don’t know what to say about this beyond book burning is never right. I haven’t read it, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it was a danger to any society.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell was banned at a California High School. It was challenged in Illinois due to its use of the word “nigger.”

Much as that word makes me shudder, it was in use when Mitchell wrote it and certainly in the time period in which her book is set.
It is reflective of the times and not using that word in proper context is a lie, plain and simple.
We can’t go around sanitizing everything because that's a lie, too. You can argue that fiction is lie if you like, but don’t bother doing it around me. The greatest truths are disguised as fiction.

Using the words appropriate to the times, especially those that make us cringe, shows us how much we’ve grown as a society.
If it doesn’t, then it shows us that we need to grow.

And in a lovely bit of irony Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury had its cuss words blacked out for school use.

Perhaps whoever did it was making a point as the book is about censorship and book burning. Somehow I don’t believe it’s the case.

At the top of the post I wrote about a book not being a danger to society. No book is a danger to any free and open society that is a democracy in practice as well as in name.

The only danger to society presented by books is they create and foster a society of thinkers. Who would want a world of intellectually curious critical thinkers?

Let It Be Hypberbole

Saturday found me in a local drugs store stocking up on writing chocolate. As I was musing over the choices a woman came in and struck up a conversation with someone in the nearby pharmacy section. Even though my mind was on my most important concern I overheard bits of their talk.

“I don’t know how anyone could waste their time reading.”

My ears pricked up and my blood began to simmer.

“…got a friend who likes her romances. And when she wants a break, she reads something different!”

Then older of the two turned up my blood from simmer to boil. “… must have 5,000 books in my basement. Maybe I should just have a big bonfire.”

No.

I’m all for freedom of speech, but some things shouldn’t be joked about, not after the book burnings of the last century.

Some people rescue puppies, others devote their time to saving historical buildings, with me it’s books. I don’t like to see them suffer.
I have to hold myself back at garage sales because I feel a deep need to rescue every book. They need good homes, someone who’ll care for them and gaze lovingly upon their spines on the shelf.

My breathing was rapid and shallow.
I will take your books.


I took my chocolate and went to pay for it.
The clerk noted how I was the second person that day to buy that amount of chocolate.
“It’s my writing chocolate.” I felt the need to express myself as writer and therefore someone who respects books, not jokes about torching them.
I forced myself to walk out of the store and not back to the woman to ask her to please tell me she was kidding.

Years ago I rescued a book from a fire. It’s an awful book all about conspiracy and the new world order. It’s written to charge up the emotions and that makes it hard to maintain rational thought. It’s easy to believe the lies and half-truths when you’re in a frenzy of paranoid fear.

It has a right to exist. If we go about burning books with which we don’t agree we’ll never see the other side of anything. Worse, we’ll forget why they’re so bad because we’ll have forgotten dissent exists.

Ignoring something won’t make it go away. Education makes it go away. We need to keep ideas in the forefront so they can be discussed and disseminated and argued.
If they’re good we need to know. If they’re bad we need to know why.

Perhaps this is a bit far afield from a woman who made a joke about having so many books, but there’ll be no book burning on my watch.