| Current mood: |  busy |
| Current music: | oh you're so condescending, your gall is neverending |
| Entry tags: | books, censorship |
I cannot read any more of this Ann Rinaldi book. How on earth did this woman's books get to be so popular? Blech.
I have not read The Buffalo Tree, the subject of this article on the banning of the book in Muhlenberg, PA, but I have read three of Adam Rapp's other books, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog, 33 Snowfish, and Little Chicago, and all I have to say is this:
THANK YOU, ADAM RAPP!
Thank you for being so bold in your writing. Thank you for bringing the harshness that is often teen reality to the limelight with a ferocity that few other authors have managed. Thank you for your honesty, and for your talent that allows us to see your disturbed characters not as shocking and fear-inducing, but sympathetic and human. I will always buy your books for my library, and if they are lost, stolen, or destroyed, I will replace them. I will not insult the intelligence of teens by stocking books without bad words or sex or drugs or rock and roll. Their lives are as complicated as your books and as Chris Crutcher said, to censor teen books is to censor teens.
ETA: Here's what Bookslut had to say about it.
I am always disheartened by censorship, especially by those who are willfully ignorant of everything in a book except for a few bad words. Words hurt so much less than having a closed mind. It's been a bad couple of weeks in the library world for censorship, between this ban, warning labels on "sexually explicit" teen books, and the ban on King and King in Oklahoma that may result in any book with any sort of reference to homosexuality being moved to a restricted section of a library. (Who wants to relabel the books on Alexander the Great?) There's already a library in the county I work in that separates it's YA collection into "middle school" (those books are kept in the children's section) and "high school." They think it's the greatest thing ever. Personally, I disagree with them. Sometimes we have a hard enough time just deciding whether a book should go in teen or adult, and now they want to say, "Ninth graders should read this book, but eighth graders shouldn't?" Who's got that kind of time?
One of the things I hear a lot as a childfree person is that I'm selfish. Breeder bingo aside, I'm just astonished at how selfish so many of the parents are in this NYT article.
Tammy Hahn, a mother of four and perhaps the most outspoken of the book's opponents, responded that the students' view was irrelevant. She was not about to let her daughter take part in a classroom discussion about erections, she said, adding that it amounted to harassment to subject a girl to the smirks and innuendoes of male classmates who would have no sympathy for her discomfort.
"This is not about a child's opinion," she said of the students' defense of the book. "This is about parents."
It is? Then the parents can jolly well go into the classroom every day, sit at the desks, do the homework, take the ACT, etc. I've seen parents like this and it's not pretty. I get the feeling she doesn't get a lot of attention at home. And if it's about the parents, then why do we have teachers and librarians? How selfish is it of her to tell other people what's appropriate for their children to read? But what do I know? I don't even have (bipedal) kids.
The other thing that irks me about this case in PA? They want to assign a RATINGS SYSTEM to books, like (dare I say it?) the MPAA's. Oy. I say that when they can read every book in my collection cover-to-cover and come to a unanimous vote on every book without any previous discussion, then I'll think about it. Oh, and I have to agree with them, as does every single parent of a teenager in town. Any dissention is grounds for the book not getting a rating.
The town I work in is reportedly conservative, but I'm lucky enough to have not had any challenges yet to anything in my collection. Half of that is probably because no one bothers to wander through my teen section, but hey, I'm not arguing.
Book Expo tomorrow and Saturday, Hogwarts Local NYC meetup on Sunday. Back Monday.
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cedarlibrarian) wrote,
