Banned Books Week
A week we shouldn't need. (The Bus 4.1)
Welcome aboard The Bus!
The Stop
Next week (1 - 7 October) is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week - an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Spotlighting both historical and current attempts to censor books in libraries and schools, the purpose of the event (which began in 1982) is to unite the entire book community - librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and (most importantly) readers - in support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some people consider unorthodox, unpopular or even ‘dangerous.’1
The American Library Association is acutely aware of the effect the current ‘time of intense political polarisation’ is having on books and those who work with them. In every state, ‘library staff … are facing an unprecedented number of attempts to ban books.’ In 2022, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources - the ‘highest number of attempted book bans’ since the organisation began recording this data over 20 years ago. This number nearly doubles 2021’s 729 book challenges, and of the 2,571 unique titles targeted for censorship, most were by or about LGBTQIA+ persons2 along with Black, Indigenous and other people of colour. Differences, in other words.3
For more information, you can click these two links:
The Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022 provides a list of these texts, along with the number of challenges and the reason for them.
The Censorship by the Numbers link provides a map of the US which shows the number of attempts in a given state along with the title of the most frequently challenged book.
The Detour
Today’s Detour is to a Youtube film (19:58) by Jack Edwards. A graduate from Durham University in English Literature, Edwards is the author of The Uni-Verse: The Ultimate University Survival Guide (2020). He also is a well-known and prolific Youtuber who, among other things, focusses on books. In this episode, he explores his shelves to find out exactly how many of the books he owns he’s actually read. But this isn’t easy because - as he says - ‘Buying books and reading books are two entirely different hobbies. I thoroughly enjoy both.’ I fully appreciate this sentiment - and love the way he equates buying books to buying a fine wine: you buy it now with the knowledge that it needs to sit awhile before it’s ready to open. It’s fun if you like books, otherwise you can skip this one.
How Many of My 1000+ Books Have I Read?
The Recommendation
Today’s Recommendation is Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 (1953). Itself an occasionally challenged and/or banned book, it is - ironically - about the very problems that beset a society in which books are outlawed. Guy Montag is a ‘fireman,’ tasked with burning any books which are found, but over the course of the novel he becomes disillusioned with his job and eventually quits and becomes an outlaw committed to the preservation of culture and literature. It’s a great dystopian novel, and unfortunately prescient today 70 years after its publication.
Farenheit 451 can be found in new or used bookstores and libraries.
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is composed of five tracks that - for various reasons - have found themselves challenged and/or banned by radio stations and even - in one case - investigated by the FBI:4 ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’ (Tom Petty, 1994), ‘Jackie’ (Scott Walker, 1968), ‘Louie Louie’ (The Kingsmen, 1963), ‘Lola’ (The Kinks, 1970) and ‘The Pill’ (Loretta Lynn, 1975). Enjoy!
The Thought
Today’s Thought is from the German poet, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856):
‘Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!
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Until the next Stop …
Few issues grind me as much as censorship. Books are meant to be read - if you don’t like it, don’t read it, but don’t tell me I can’t. Sources for today’s Stop include Banned Books Week 2023 (ALA), Banned and Censored Songs, The 10 Best Rock Songs Banned from Radio and The Greatest Banned Songs of All Time - Ranked! (The Guardian).
If you’re unaware, the acronym ‘brings together many different gender and sexual identities that often face marginalisation across society.’ Specifically, it stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual - and the + ‘holds space for the expanding and new understanding of different parts of the very diverse gender and sexual identities.’ For more information, see Princeton University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Centre.
Of course, banning and challenging books is nothing new. Books as varied as Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Orwell’s 1984, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker’s The Colour Purple, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Golding’s The Lord of the Flies have historically been the target of those who would attempt to do such things (idiots, by any other name). Follow this link for a long list of Frequently Challenged Classics.
The reasons: While Tom Petty’s ‘You Don’t Know How it Feels’ hasn’t been banned, the line ‘let’s smoke another joint’ was censored before airplay, though Petty - instead of making a radio-friendly version, replaced the offending word with a recording of him saying ‘joint’ backwards … so they’re smoking another ‘nooj’. Which isn’t psychedelic at all. Scott Walker’s ‘Jackie’ was banned by the BBC for its lines about ‘authentic queers and phony virgins’ and ‘boats of opium’. The lyrics of the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ are so garbled that on release no one seemed to understand what they’re about - a fear of the unknown which meant some radio stations banned the song as a precaution and the FBI actually launched an investigation into it. Which sounds about right. The Kinks’s ‘Lola’ was banned by the BBC - not because of its story about a youngster’s ambiguous drunken sexual encounter with a transvestite - but because the line ‘Where they drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola’ went directly against the company’s product placement policy. So, it’s ‘cherry cola’ now, to get around this. Loretta Lynn’s ‘The Pill’ was banned by many country stations because - while there were ‘plenty of country songs about abortion and birth control’ - none of them had the singer ‘happily’ equating having the Pill with more freedom of choice and - shudder - fun.
This is a compelling post Bryan. I appreciate your advocacy.
My fullest support for this Bryan. I note that Andy Partridge riffs on Heine in his most apt song 'Books are Burning' (1992). Let me add that to your 'sounds' list.
And more selfishly, a link back to my comments about such 'banned' lists.
https://drgvloewen.substack.com/p/why-the-most-radical-fiction-in-the
Just for interest, even if one might maintain one's doubts, I have had a long and quite intimate conversation with one of the founders of 'Moms for Liberty', the NPO that ALA blames for instigating many of the attempts at book censorship, and just in fairness, their official position is simply about distribution of materials, not outright bans. I imagine I am one of the few authors who agree with this sensibility - with one exception, my fiction books are not for persons under 14 and should not appear in certain school libraries because of this - and the books they have put forward to state their case do seem egregiously irrelevant for children and yet they are to be found in many such venues, and indeed, are mindful of nothing other than Eric Idle's famous MP sketch:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Eric+Idle+storytime&qpvt=Eric+Idle+storytime&FORM=VDRE
Too bad satire is also falling on deaf ears in this whole falderal. Cheers, Greg