I’ve found myself thinking about Banned Books Week, an annual event I have come to celebrate on this blog and which will start this year on October 4th. I enthusiastically urge you to pick a banned or challenged book to read. Odds are you’ll learn something… and it pisses off The Man.
Besides the top 11 challenged books from the last year, you can also consult a rather evergreen list of challenged or banned books on Wikipedia. Basically, any type of read or genre of book you want has probably put someone’s knickers in a twist. And now they’re upset that I used the word ‘knickers.’
As it happens, I’ve already read a challenged book and re-read an oft-banned book this year, but I’m feeling that I ought to try to add a classic or “literary” entry for the week itself. My current tradition of reading a banned book on or around Banned Books Week started with The Catcher in the Rye, after all.
But what does “literary” mean anyway? For me and dozens of other folks who were voracious readers in our youth, we came to understand that some of the books we tore through might be “improper.” Not in a banned or challenged way, although I did have experiences with adults trying to shield me from Tintin and Terabithia growing up. No, these were improper because they weren’t the “right” sort of books. Or not right enough.
Not only were the science fiction and fantasy lesser works by virtue of being “genre,” Young Adult or YA books that we were encouraged to read in those under-18 years were also second class. It wasn’t like any of childhood readers didn’t understand that not all books were written the same. Charles Dickens’ prose did not sound like Beverly Cleary’s… and now I’m imagining a Dickensian version of Ribsy, but I digress. No one could ever explain the snootiness scale.
It seemed to me and my indecently reading cohort that Serious Adults had an opinion of books similar to movies and absolutely refused to acknowledge that Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla had cinematic aspirations wholly different from Throne of Blood, yet both were enjoyable Japanese cinema. In fact, if a film purports to give you a “Throne of Blood” experience and instead delivers Godzooky, you are right to shoot a metaphorical arrow through its throat.
Okay, maybe that’s getting a bit violent, but have you seen Kurosawa and Kaiju flicks? The seven samurai killed a lot more than their number and all those plastic tanks weren’t unmanned.
Anyway, these were among the thoughts I was thinking when I read Vanessa Di Gregorio’s article about her dislike of the term “literary fiction.” That separation has always felt arbitrary, especially given some of the historical evidence that today’s classics that are “clearly” literary fiction were clearly commercial works of their day. So I agree with Di Gregorio that folks should chill on using “literary fiction” as a capricious divider.
Yet not all books are created equal any more than all films are created equal as the honest creators of either will attest. And as implied above, some books or films are after more than a cautionary tale about enlisting in the plastic tank corps. There is more to life than men in rubber suits smashing a scale model of downtown Tokyo (metaphorically speaking). Sometimes I want a page-turning thriller, but sometimes I want to luxuriate in the language of a Peter Matthiessen or Julia Alvarez novel. In fact, I find I want and perhaps need that kind of novel in my reading diet over the course of a year… I just don’t want to read that to the exclusion of other novels any more than I want to read only fiction or non-fiction.
There’s a notion that great art can say many things at once and I have to agree that many of the works categorized as “literary fiction” that I’ve read –including those that have been banned or challenged– meet that definition admirably. That’s one of the reasons I’m contemplating one of them for Banned Books Week. I simply find that some of the works which are not categorized as such also have something to say.
So as you’re considering what book (or books) to pick to read on or around Banned Books Week, consider that whatever you choose, whatever the book has to say is something a would-be censor doesn’t want you to hear.
And that makes for some of the most interesting stories.