Celebrate Banned Books Week!

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -Alfred Whitney Griswold, New York Times, February 24, 1959 

This week marks the 30th annual celebration of Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the freedom to read. This week, readers across the world take a hard look at the list of books challenged or banned across history, holding firmly to the belief that while individuals may choose what they (or their children, as the case may be) will read, they do not have the right to call for government action to prevent others from reading or viewing said material.

William Brennan, US Supreme Court Justice, said in his ruling on Texas v. Johnson, "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." In other words, if you write something no one wants to read about it, your book should theoretically ban itself -- we don't need to do the work for you. And if even just one person wants to read your offensive or disagreeable idea... well, who are we to dictate bad taste?

In reviewing the list of books challenged, burned,* removed from schools and/or libraries, or outright banned in 2010 and 2011 alone (download the PDF of the list here), the list of objections to titles ranges from "it gave my daughter nightmares" (The Hunger Games, challenged in New Hampshire in 2010) to labeling books "pervasively vulgar, obscene and inappropriate (Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, which was named one of the best adult books for high school students by SLJ in 2001).

I've read a few of the books on the 2010-2011 list, and I plan to celebrate this week by going back to a much earlier banned book - To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm ashamed to say that I have not read this since middle school.

Personally, I think this is the best part of the attempts to ban books: in attempting to ban a book, all censors do is succeed in calling more attention to it -- which in turns, means more people want to read it. Just look at what happened to Laurie Anderson's Speak last year; calling rape "pornographic" is a good way to piss off a lot of readers, women, teens, and advocates... and an even better way to make Speak's sales sky-rocket.

So what are you reading this week? What books have you read that have been challenged or banned? Are you more interested in a challenged book after it has been challenged?

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* It's the 21st century... do we really need to burn things we don't like anymore? Isn't that a little Salem-ish of us? Can't we just de-friend it on Facebook and call it a day?

Thanks to the National Banned Books Week program (download PDF) for the data seen above. Image from www.bannedbooksweek.org.

Huckleberry Finn, Censor-style: Removing the N-word from Huck Finn

The following post could also be retitled "In Which I Hop on the Bandwagon and Defend the Original Huck Finn." But I can't help voicing my opinion, which is why I have my own blog, in which I play writer, editor and publisher.

In case you all have completely missed it, after years and years of fighting on and off the banned books list, an editor has actually succeeded in publishing a version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn with the n-word replaced with "slave" throughout the text. A bit shockingly, the editor of the text is a professor and Mark Twain scholar - two groups notoriously against censorship in literature. In the introduction to the new edition, published by New South Books, Dr. Alan Gribben defends his decision:

"We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers."

He goes on to assume that Mark Twain "presumably would have been quick to adapt his language if he could have foreseen how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country." The only solid "evidence" he has that this version is, in fact, better than the original is an anecdote about teaching a class in which both he and his students were uncomfortable when discussing the word.

Quite honestly, I don't even know where to begin. Ultimately, the new "edition" of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn seems to amount to little more than censorship. If censorship is defined as the "suppression or deletion of anything considered to be objectionable," and Dr. Gribben has removed the n-word because it is repulsive to modern-day readers, I fail to see how this is not censorship. If the word was objectionable during the time of writing - which historians as well as Dr. Gribben argue - and the word is still objectionable now, I fail to see how we can assume that Mark Twain would now choose to write a different, less-offensive version.

I have not read any of Twain's work since high school - though I hope to remedy that soon - but the main takeaway that I recall from his work was precisely that in a very pro-slavery time, in a pro-slavery area, Twain himself was remarkably anti-slavery - and not afraid to discuss it. His incorporation of the derisive word falls in with his use of a whole host of inappropriate or objectionable slang (both then and now), and this, we are taught, was precisely the point. To feel the need to remove the objectionable bits is to fail to understand the text. That, and as readers, it is never our place to assume what the now-dead author would prefer now. That is overstepping our boundaries.

Or so my high-school English teacher would say. What about you? Is this censorship, or a reasonable way to make a dated text more acceptable to a modern audience? Is this a one-off incident, or the starting slide down a slippery slope?

For more information (and some solid entertainment), check out the following:

• Amanda defends Twain - and rants against the new edition - in her excellent and well-articulated post on Dead White Guys (a blog worth following any day of the week, I should add).
• Huckleberry Finn is a trending topic on Twitter (Is this the first time this has happened for a literary topic? And no, "literary" does not include Twilight, Harry Potter, or Snooki.
• Colbert offers his opinion on the new Huck Finn. He's absolutely pro-censoring the book. Hysterical, as all Colbert clips tend to be.
• A bookseller at Boswell and Books takes a different stance: the edited Huck Finn may not be great, but the book is public domain and therefore the original text is still available.
• The Guardian has an excellent article by Peter Messent (author of the Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain) on Twain's very explicit choice of words, even bringing to light this quote from Twain himself: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Books Are Threatening National Security

In a bizarre twist following the foiled Christmas Bomber (in case you've been under a rock since December, you can read the story here), Transport Canada has now limited all carry-on items to a restricted list (which includes medical equipment, laptops, musical instruments, and small purses). Ok, I guess that makes sense. But - and you knew there had to be a but - the list of allowed items quite blantantly excludes books, magazines and newspapers.

What? Really? Books and newspapers aren't allowed, but laptops and laptop cases are? Musical instruments pose less of a possible threat than printed matter? I'm not sure what kind of reading materials these authorities are used to seeing, but I'm going to venture to guess that most of it probably isn't going to harm fellow passengers. Ok, having to watch a woman bawl her eyes out while reading Nora Roberts might be harmful...

Don't get me wrong, I am all for safe flights, national security, baggage screening, limited items in carry-ons, etc (although it's a pain to find 3-oz cans of hairspray sometimes). At the same time, however, there is a point where it has gone too far - both because it starts to get absurd, and it makes for a really lousy flight.

Really, between the prospect of no snacks, $8 drinks, $20 baggage fees (mind you, carry-on luggage is now extremely limited even outside of Canada) and only an in-flight movie to keep me entertained, Amtrak and it's absurd prices are starting to sound more and more appealing.

For more information: National Post article, January Post blog.

Thanks to LitDrift for posting the link!

Banned Books Week: A Quick Follow-up

Sorry, guys, I know I'm due for some more original thinking here - it will come, I promise. Reviews of Her Fearful Symmetry and two Agatha Christie novels are in the works, and I'm reading my way through The Secret History. But in the meantime, a quick note on Banned Books Week, which took place Sept 25-Oct 3:

The Guardian, reporting on collected Amazon reports, noted that sales of And Tango Makes Three, the most challenged book of 2006, 2007 and 2008 (according to the ALA), peaked during Banned Books Week and the days immediately after. The book is challenged frequently on grounds of "homosexual undertones," which critics claim are thinly veiled under cute penguin cartoons. The story, based on true events, tell the tale of two male penguins raising an orphan penguin in the zoo. Clearly, this is threatening the morality of our nation's children.

But, as I predicted, challenging the book has only increased its popularity. I'd call that books 1, censors 0, if we were keeping track.

Banned Books Week

Today marks the start of Banned Books Week 2009, an event created to celebrate the importance of the First Amendment. The American Library Association (ALA) offers some good insight into historical banned books on their website, and it's worth poking around if you are interested in the subject.

A quick glance over the top ten banned books lists from 2001-2008 reveals some interesting and unexpected finds. Julie of the Wolves, a childhood favorite of mine, and the His Dark Materials Trilogy. The usual titles pop up: The Adventures of Huck Finn (for racism and language) and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (for much the same reasons).

In honor of the week, I will be breaking my personal book-buying-ban to read And Tango Makes Three, which was the most challenged book for 2006, 2007 and 2008. I'd never even heard of this one until I started looking into banned book lists; I wonder what this says about the efficacy of book-banning efforts. Rather than banning the title, the book-banners have served only to bring it more and more into the public eye.

This seems to be somewhat of a continuous occurence. Recall last fall when there where vicious and unsubstantiated rumors floating around about Sarah Palin's book-banning efforts, if you will. While the rumors turned out to be false, they brought the issue of banned books back into the spotlight. People once again realized that book banning has not disappeared - rather, it is rampant across the United States (see a map of banning efforts).

In the end, maybe we should let the crazy people try to ban books. More often than not, they will fail; the First Amendment may be complicated for some issues, but the matter of censoring reading materials seems pretty black-and-white in regards to the law. In the process, though, banned books will be remembered, old favorites picked up and seen in a new light, and, hopefully, we can remember that we are almost all, on some level, passionate about books and reading. If it takes a controversy to remind us of that, I'll take it. And I'll take those banned books, too. Off to the Strand...