tamelyn

“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”–Virginia Woolf

It’s Banned Books Week, an annual event in the United States, celebrating our intellectual freedom to access information and express ideas, however unorthodox or unpopular.

Today, here in America, classics like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Howl, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, and even Winnie-the-Pooh continue to be challenged for what some readers consider to be a controversial depiction of race, sex, or politics, or which are simply alleged to “set a bad example.”

And abroad, of course, there is a similarly colorful book-banning history. Books like July’s People (South Africa), A Feast for the Seaweeds (Egypt), Angaray (India), Areopagitica (England), Brave New World (Ireland), and Dr. Zhivago (Russia) — to name only a few — were banned or censored by governments that feared the power of the written word in the hands of such masters as Nadine Gordimer, Mark Twain, and Aldous Huxley.

As Carolyn Kellogg wrote so eloquently in yesterday’s Los Angeles Timeswith regard to current efforts to ban books: “This is at the core of the matter, the idea that by locking away the words that describe life experiences we might retain a kind of innocence. As if without To Kill a Mockingbird there might be no racism, or without Catcher in the Rye we might forestall the difficult questions of adolescence. This, of course, is hardly the case; these books might, just might, help teach us otherwise.”

It’s Banned Books Week. Celebrate the so-called subversive, the unpopular, the unorthodox. Embrace those writers whose ideas make you squirm. Choose your book — Ulysses, Harry Potter, Lolita –and share it with a friend. And take off that blind-fold.

-- pamullman

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