Wrapping Up Banned Books Week
Saturday marks the end of Banned Books Week. I didn’t do a very aggressive job this year posting something daily related to the theme. I imagine my aggregator is overflowing with Banned Books Week items. I just haven’t made the effort to plow through the pile of stuff lately.
I’m about halfway through Fallen Angels, a book of fiction about soldiers in Vietnam that’s on the list of books frequently challenged in 2004. Within the first fifty pages, I understood why people would object to the book for language, violence, and racism. Offensive language comes up in dialog every few pages. I’ve learned a slew of new insults. By page fifty, there’s a graphic description of the death of a soldier. The book is also about the difficult issues of the Vietnam Conflict, death, and family matters.
That being said, I’m really enjoying the book. I like reading books about military history anyway and it’s been a while since I’ve read one. I like Walter Dean Myers’ writing style. The book is peppered with humor, even though it deals with serious subjects. I feel like it’s sucked me in: I care about the characters and what they’re doing and I want to know what happens during the course of the book. It’s been a while since I’ve read something that makes me want to stay up all night reading.
I doubt I will finish it during Banned Books Week. I’m not sure I’ll be able to read Forever …, the last book I borrowed for the holiweek, as I need to read a book for the book group by next week, too. Ugh! Lots to read.
As I was explaining Banned Books Week to some people, they almost didn’t believe me. We had a chat about why people would want to ban books and how the banning is actually carried out. The idea was so strange to them. I thought, “How lucky are you that you’ve never experienced this personally!”
December 4th, 2005 at 10:23 am
I’ve never asked for a book to be banned, and don’t intend to start. I do, however, think that profanity, obscenity, and vulgarity have a very specific message - one of disrespect. Profanity communicates disrespect for God, and the others a disrespect for humans, their bodies, and sexuality.
Freedom of speech allows people to portray that disrespect as an attribute of others (either positively or negatively) or to directly project that disrespect as the author’s viewpoint.
I can deal with profanity, obscenity, and vulgarity when necessary, but often when I read or listen to audio books (as I spend a lot of time in the car), I would like to focus on other messages. “Offensive” language and explicit sexuality is very powerful, and certainly tends to distract from other more subtle aspects of literature. I have had a very difficult time finding lists of books of high literary quality that do not have language commonly considered offensive. I am not looking for an enforced rating system, just a resource for easily identifying books (especially young adult and adult fiction) that do not burden the reader with these distractions.