When Jay Speyerer and I created This Awful Awesome Life, we agreed every September issue would include information about banned books and censorship.
It made sense, Jay and I were both writers and avid readers. We each grew up with a reverence for books and libraries.
My public library, its bookmobile that visited my school, and my school library were magical places for me.
They held thousands of adventures, ideas, and destinations I could only dream about.
When the realities of my father’s terminal illness became too much, I could lose myself in the stacks, wandering aimlessly through the classics, biographies, or contemporary fiction. I could sit with him while he slept and escape for a while in a good book. After he died, books provided me with a respite from my grief.
During high school, I was introduced to the AP English reading list. In addition to the books we would be reading for class, we were required to read a book each month from the list and be prepared to answer one of three essay questions selected by our teacher. We didn’t know the questions until the day we had to write our essay, in class. Introduction, body, and conclusion, 500 words legibly written in 50 minutes and “very,” better not be one of the words.
I remember how much we complained, but it taught me (and my fellow students) to focus on the task at hand. It didn’t help my penmanship, but that’s for another article. It exposed me to a world of books I might never have read. Sometimes instead of a written essay, we had to give an oral presentation about the book. This wasn’t a “tell what happened” presentation. It was an analysis of the work which had to include enough specifics that the teacher knew you read the book. What still amazes me the most about these presentations is that my teachers had read every book on the list, and they remembered minute details.
Many of the books on the list had been challenged or banned at some point in time. Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harper Lee, Anne Frank, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, D.H. Lawrence, Vladmir Nabokov, Gustave Flaubert, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Toni Morrison, Alan Sillitoe, Joseph Heller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Golding all had books on my AP English reading list that had been challenged or banned.
I could have been denied the opportunity to read such classics as A Farewell to Arms, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, Catch 22, The Metamorphosis, Madame Bovary, Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, The Great Gatsby, or Slaughterhouse-Five.
I’m so happy that my school district trusted our English department to choose books that would take us out of our comfort zones and make us think. From these books, I learned about actions and consequences. I learned that the world isn’t fair and probably never will be, but I also learned that one person or a group of people can make a difference if they call out injustice. One person who is willing to listen can save a life.
Most important of all, I learned to keep an open mind. Sometimes it’s not easy, but if we all tried there would be fewer banned books and a greater understanding of the world we share.