It is surprising and alarming to walk into a bookshop and find a display of banned books. Not what you quite expect. This is what greeted me in my favourite Strand bookshop on Columbus Avenue in New York City a couple of weeks ago. Apparently it was ‘Banned Books Week’ where bookshops (maybe only in New York State, I’m not sure) were encouraged to raise awareness of the situation in several states, particularly Texas and Florida, where books were being banned from school libraries and in some cases town libraries as well. What books I hear you ask?
Well, even more alarming …
Anna Karenina, all of George Orwell and of Margaret Attwood and John Steinbeck, picture books by Maurice Sendak, works by JD Salinger, To kill a Mockingbird, Atonement by Ian McEwan, the books of James Joyce and of Proust and Don Quixote by Cervantes. That is by no means a complete list but it gives you a flavour.
And the next question is: who is demanding these books be removed from libraries? Well, it seems to be ultra right wing political groups, fundamentalist evangelical churches and parents who just appear to be paranoid, deluded and incredibly fearful.
The books on display, which one could of course buy, had cards in them explaining why they had been targeted: nudity, sexuality, gender, political persuasion, lifestyle, race, any straying away from monogamy and the nuclear family, any apparent attack on Christianity and deviation from creationism.
After I had recovered and composed myself, my 12 year old granddaughter who is a 7th grader at a New York City Middle School, walked along the display saying: ‘ Well I’ve read this one and we’ve done this in English class and I’ve taken that one and that one out of the school library.’ I felt exceedingly glad that she was at school in New York and not elsewhere in that fractured country.
We talked about dystopian books and in particular The Giver by Lois Lowry. Her class had read this together and I had read it too…and very much disliked it! Just too depressing and yes dystopian. I had told her that I had read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and had no intention of reading the sequel! But, I may dislike the books but I would have no wish to ban them.
In a sage fashion well beyond her years, my granddaughter commented that we should read some dystopian stories as the world was not all princesses, sparkly rainbows and unicorns! What could I say. Her final comment pleased me immensely: ‘My English teacher says that knowledge is power.’
With that we went off to buy coffee and pain au chocolat … or chocolate croissants as Americans call them.