The First Time I Hit a Banned Book
The librarians didn’t just refuse to hand over the banned book. They sat me down and demanded to know why I wanted to read it.Share on X
I was in high school in the 1970s when I wanted to read The Grapes of Wrath. Read it today and it’s tame, a Depression-era story about a family driven off their land. But back then, at my school, it was banned from the library. I went to check it out and couldn’t have it.
Then it got worse. They sat me down and wanted to know why I wanted to read it.
I was a teenager. Being interrogated about my own curiosity, as if wanting to read a Steinbeck novel made me a suspect, did exactly what you’d expect to an adolescent. It enraged me, and it made me want the book more.
That was my introduction to book banning. Not the abstract idea of it. The specific experience of an adult deciding a book was too dangerous for me, and then treating my interest in it as something I had to explain.
What My Parents Did Instead
My parents never censored what I read. They cared that I was reading at all. The rest they left to me, and that trust did more than any banned list ever could.Share on X
Here’s the contrast that’s stuck with me for fifty years. My parents never stopped me from reading anything.
If I wanted to read something, they didn’t care what it was. They didn’t look at my list or vet my choices. All they cared about was that I was reading at all. They were too busy to review what I was looking at, and I put “too busy” in quotes on purpose, because if they’d looked at some of what I was reading, they probably would have objected.
But they didn’t look, and that turned out to be a gift. The trust, accidental or not, did more for me than any approved reading list ever could. I read widely, I read things that were over my head, and I figured out for myself what I thought about them. That’s what reading is supposed to do. The school wanted to protect me from a book. My parents let a book do its job.
What Banned Books Week Is
Banned Books Week runs in late September into early October. Libraries, bookstores, and writers use it to spotlight books that have been challenged or removed, and to make a simple argument. The freedom to read is the thing that matters.
A challenge is when someone asks that a book be removed from a library or a school.
A ban is when the library or school pulls it. The books that draw challenges are rarely the ones you’d expect. Classics, award winners, books that have been on shelves for decades. The Grapes of Wrath is a textbook example, a Pulitzer winner and a banned book at the same time.
Nobody’s pretending every book belongs in every place. The week is about who gets to decide, and on what grounds, and whether the answer to a book you dislike is to remove it or to argue with it.
Why It Is Not a Settled Question
Book banning didn’t end with the teenagers of the 1970s. I still run into it, at bookstores and in the news, and from what I can see it’s become more common again in recent years.
The limits of what I know matter here.
I’ve noticed it shows up more in some cities and less in smaller and rural communities, and I don’t know why that is. It might be demographics or something else. I’m not going to pretend I have the explanation, because I don’t. What I can tell you is that the impulse is alive, the impulse to decide for other people what they’re allowed to read.
That impulse is worth resisting wherever it shows up and whoever it comes from. A society that can’t trust adults to choose their own books, and to guide their own children, is a society that’s decided thinking is too dangerous to leave to the people doing it. I wrote a whole book about where that leads, called The Death of Thinking, because the road from “you cannot read that” to “you cannot think that” is shorter than it looks.
How do you mark Banned Books Week?
Read a banned book. That’s the entire assignment, and it’s more fun than it sounds. The list of challenged and banned titles is full of great books, and reading one is a quiet way of saying the choice is yours.
Pick one that was pulled from a shelf somewhere and find out for yourself what the fuss was about.
Hand one to a teenager and let them make up their own mind, the way my parents did with me. Support a library, since libraries are usually the ones fighting to keep books available. And if someone tells you a book is too dangerous to read, treat that as the best possible reason to read it.
The teenager who got interrogated over Steinbeck is now a man with a house full of books and a career built on words. The lesson held. Nobody gets to decide what you’re allowed to read. Banned Books Week just says it out loud once a year.