A hundred little rebellions
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” – Oscar Wilde. Or, Book Bans, and the nature of rebellion through stories
So this week is Banned Books Week. This is a (I was going to say a heavier topic, but I’ve literally talked about grief so… ) slightly different topic. I’d also like to think I’ve made my views pretty clear in this substack, but let me tell you…. Any regime that starts banning (and burning) books and restricting information to its citizens, doesn’t end up looking so good in History’s eyes.
I’m a writer. I will NEVER be okay with banning books. If you ban anything, it usually just is like forbidden fruit, and it makes people want it more. And banning books is just… It’s one of the biggest arguments I have, like if you don’t want to read something, just don’t read it!!! But don’t get up in other people’s business about it. A lot of the book currently on the most challenged/banned books on the American Library Association’s list for 2023 are books aimed at teens with LGBTGIA+ content. Again, if you are not one of those letters, just don’t read it! Don’t ban it. But to take away a child’s or a teen’s ability to possibly identify and understand themselves. I really… It’s hard for me to express the visceral anger I get thinking about that in these words. But I really really would like to punch someone.
I personally have a lot of skin in the game. I feel like books have always been my constant companions, there through thick and thin, there for me in the way the people in your life can’t necessarily be there for you. In another conversation, me telling you how inanimate objects are so close to me would me an immediate trip to a padded room no? But books - and by extension stories have been around nearly as long as humans have. The odyssey, for example was shared by storytellers specfically around campfires before language was able to record these things. If I had lived around then, you bet your ass if would have been a bard. A bardette? Bardess? Sorry I digress. And yes I rhymed that on purpose.
But as I am getting ready to publish my novel, it’s something that weighs on me too. Not that I imagine my story of a princess who finds herself away from her family and discovers who she is in modern day new york city being particularly controversial, but I do cover some intense themes. There’s death, political violence, sexual assault, amongst other things. But it’s meant to be a reflection of our modern world. The things that do happen in the modern world. The Handmaid’s Tale, which of course features in the top 100 banned books of all time, is a perfect example of this. There’s a quote by Author Margaret Atwood, where she says to the effect of, I didn’t make any of the oppression up - these are all things that have happened to women before. There’s a story that I read (saw on TikTok?) that for the life of me I can’t find again, but it goes like this. A mother and child went to a library, the child picked up a book, which was in an age appropriate section, took home the book, and later showed the book to their mother and said, this is me! This is what daddy is doing to me! I read something with the author where she was like, of course I hate getting banned, but the fact that it saved that one child from further abuse is what keeps me going. As it should! As authors we want people to relate to what we are writing. And in this case, if it stops something that I think most people can agree is pretty evil, why would you want to let evil win in this case? It’s not like the authors are making up things that don’t happen in the world you and I live in.
Authors don’t actually make up the world - we take what we see and synthesize it in a different way to present it to you as fiction - but we are just describing what we understand of the world.
So, with that being said, here’s a few books that I’ve read from the ALA’s top banned books of 2010s to provide some silly commentary on. I really thought I would find Harry Potter on this list, but I guess It was more banned in the late 90’s and early 2000s. The series was banned for themes of Satanism and the Occult, leading children to hate and rebellion (which tangent incoming), amongst other religious themes. But this argument always pissses me off. Because very few people read books (except the Bible, which is also fiction, guys, it was written hundreds of years after the actual people who are in it were alive) as a handbook, a to do list, and very few are hypnotized a la Derek Zoolander to kill the Malaysian Prime Minister!! The point is that no one actually says oh a character is doing this so I should to.
Let’s go with the Harry Potter theme, actually (RIP Dame Maggie Smith - but I wrote this before the news broke this morning ). From the first book - it is made very clear that Draco Malfoy - and by extension his Blood Purists family, and those who support Voldemort’s rhetoric are “not good”. By the second book actually, when we meet Lucius Malfoy and understand he is responsible for the attack and assault on 11-year old Ginny Weasley. There is some deserved sympathy for Draco in later books because he is meant to be the foil to Harry - the one raised with a certain type of family. Are his parents better or worse than Harry’s (abusive - not sure how this doesn’t get talked about more, he literally lived in a CUPBOARD UNTIL AGE ELEVEN) Aunt and Uncle? He was taught to hate, and it led to his downfall by association. There’s a lot in there that I could tie to the current political climate, but I think almost all children who grew up reading Harry Potter, were able to make the connection between the Death Eaters and the Nazis. (Although apparently this didn’t include JKR? Idk I’ll do another deep dive on her at some point, but this article from 2004 blows my mind every time I think about it. She’s college educated. I don’t know HOW YOU DON”T LEARN ABOUT WWII.)
Still on the Harry Potter train, there was an article in the Atlantic just around the 2016 election actually about readers of Harry Potter were more inclined to vote against Donald Trump. Wait. You mean, that people who loved a main character who literally had an entire government try to gaslight him when he was fifteen so they could keep on with the status quo, wouldn’t fall for fascist rhetoric? No. Way. That just doesn’t track at all. (Is the sarcasm coming through there? I’m practically screaming at my keyboard as I type this.) I could keep going on a whole patented tangent/rant about this, but I did promise my silly little notes on the banned books of the last ten years (The ones in bold I highlighted on instagram this week).
#8 - Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
#12 - Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
#14 - The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
#15 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#19 - A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss
#25 - Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
#26 - A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#28 - Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#29 - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#30 - The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
#49 - The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#56 - Gossip Girl (series) by Cecily von Ziegesar
#61 - The Giver by Lois Lowry
#79 - 1984 by George Orwell
#88 - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#89 - Madeline and the Gypsies by Ludwig Bemelmans
What I do notice about every little anecdote I’ve shared is how some of these scenes live in my mind, even if I read the book 20 years ago. That is the power of books, and of these in particular. How much have those particular scenes and the disturbing nature of the feelings they engendered guided how I operate and who I have become? This is the power of stories.
I’ll close with this stephen king quote: “Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”
Until next time
XOXO,
Casey
Love this rant…. 👏👏👏