I can’t believe I almost missed Banned Books Week (Sep­tem­ber 20 through 27 in 1997). It’s espe­cial­ly odd since I’ve been in branch­es of the Cobb, Gwin­nett and Dekalb coun­ty libraries this week doing some research, and not one has so much as a notice about the event, although one of its spon­sors is the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion (the ACLU is anoth­er).

I’ve nev­er real­ly under­stood the log­ic behind ban­ning books. The for­bid­den will always be more inter­est­ing, espe­cial­ly to young peo­ple, than what is per­mit­ted or even man­dat­ed that they read. Do you have any idea how many kids have read For­ev­er by Judy Blume, because it is fre­quent­ly banned, when they can hard­ly be per­suad­ed to read the Sun­day fun­nies most of the time? That book made the rounds back when I was in mid­dle school, with the “good parts” being read out loud in cir­cles of gig­gling girls at break time (with some­one assigned to look out for teach­ers, of course). Most of those girls nev­er read any­thing that was­n’t absolute­ly required, beyond the occa­sion­al perusal of Tiger Beat mag­a­zine or some­thing sim­i­lar.

The same holds true for oth­er media, as well. I nev­er saw the movie The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, but I know a lot of peo­ple who saw it, sim­ply because of the uproar try­ing to keep it out of the­aters. That non­sense prob­a­bly quadru­pled its draw to the­aters.

Well, I read For­ev­er when I was 11 years old or so, and it did­n’t cause me to go out and lose my vir­gin­i­ty or even to use bad lan­guage. I’m not ter­ri­bly wor­ried about its effect, or the effect of any oth­er well-writ­ten nov­el, on kids. Mark Twain’s writ­ing did­n’t encour­age racism or the ide­al­iza­tion of oth­er races in me or any­one else I know. The hard-core porn a cousin and I found under her broth­er’s bed while clean­ing house did­n’t have any ill or last­ing effects on us (I think I was about 12, 13 at the most, then). The Play­boy and Pent­house mag­a­zines casu­al­ly strewn across the cof­fee table at one of the hous­es where I baby sat did­n’t have any, either. I’d read every­thing from Shake­speare to Judith Krantz to the Song of Solomon and a few pop­u­lar sex man­u­als and Emmanuelle before I was out of high school, and I’m still nei­ther promis­cu­ous, work­ing in a sex indus­try, or in any way pre­oc­cu­pied with sex. Read­ing V.C. Andrews did­n’t turn me into an inces­tu­ous nut­case or cause me to go live in an attic. I read Uncle Tom’s Cab­in when I was 10 years old, and I’ve nev­er in my life thrown the infa­mous epi­thet that got it banned at any­one. Read­ing Neil Schul­man and L. Neil Smith has­n’t caused me to go over­turn any gov­ern­ments, or even enter the under­ground econ­o­my. Lord of the Flies sick­ened me, rather than pro­vok­ing prim­i­tive trib­al behav­ior. As you can see, I find cen­sor­ship a tru­ly sil­ly endeav­or. I find the image of a per­son dying on a cross far more sick­en­ing and offen­sive than any of the above, but I do not try to have it banned.

I find it amus­ing that one of the best Eng­lish teach­ers*¹ I ever had (and, as far as most stu­dents assumed, the most prud­ish) gave our class some of the best advice I’ve ever heard on writ­ing. She said that to become a good writer, to devel­op your own unique voice, you must devour as much of oth­ers writ­ing as you can, good and bad and ugly. She said you must read every­thing from the Bible (start with the King James Ver­sion and read as many oth­er trans­la­tions as you can find—indispensable for any stu­dent of west­ern cul­ture) to True Con­fes­sions and the Nation­al Enquir­er and Von­negut and Chaucer and Asi­mov and dai­ly news­pa­pers and cere­al box­es and any­thing else that is words. You’ll start to notice what does and does­n’t work, what grabs you and what seems a chore, how authors man­age to pull dif­fer­ent emo­tions from you. I believe she was absolute­ly right, although I’d prob­a­bly add lis­ten­ing to as great a vari­ety of music as you can and lis­ten­ing to as many peo­ple speak­ing with dif­fer­ent lan­guages and dialects and rhythms as you can (espe­cial­ly for writ­ing dia­logue). Ban­ning or cen­sor­ing books takes away that oppor­tu­ni­ty and impov­er­ish­es our entire soci­ety in the long run. You can­not have a free soci­ety while try­ing to erad­i­cate ideas you don’t like. Stop try­ing.

A cou­ple of good sites about cen­sor­ship and book ban­ning are host­ed by
Books A to Z and the ACLU.

Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten Sep­tem­ber 25, 1997