I support
the message of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. This is a
week celebrating the freedom to read; “it highlights the value of free and open
access to information.” That’s a celebration I can get behind. The spirit of
this week makes me hopeful for open mindedness in general. But every year all
of the talk about the irrationality, the indignity, and the sheer stupidity of
banning books gets me thinking about the difference between censorship and
guidance.
This year
those thoughts took the form of squeamishness over two of our most popular
young adult books. With the film versions of Ender’s Game and Catching Fire coming out this fall, these two
already bestselling books are flying off the shelves. I’ve read and enjoyed
both novels, but I don’t know that I would recommend them to my young cousins.
The violence inherent in the subject matter of these two novels (war)
definitely has its place. However, I am constantly surprised by how much
violence is elaborately described. In Ender’s
Game we see our hero straight
up murder two children (I’m sure I could have stated that more eloquently, but
I think my phrasing expresses my feeling). Catching
Fire is the second
installment in a series about a warrior heroine sent twice to kill or die in a
battle with twenty three of her fellow man. By the final book in the trilogy, Mockingjay, Katniss’ kill count
nears ten total individuals both inside and out of the arena.
I have
been told by countless parents, teachers, and librarians that they do not worry
about the amount of violence in young adult
literature (or video games and movies for that matter). Violence is so far from
the realm of our daily lives that we do not imagine it being an issue for our
children. This is worrisome to me. While I would never imagine that someone
would bring the actions of Ender Wiggin or Katniss Everdeen into the real world
because of what they saw in their stories, I do think reading these stories
when we aren’t ready for them does damage. I mean no negativity to these two
titles in particular, but to the culture of youth violence as a whole. We
should not seek to ban Ender’s Game or Catching Fire, but we need to be having
a different sort of conversation around them. We need to be talking about the
meaning of the violence, because in neither of these works is the violence
gratuitous or meaningless. If we are going to champion books with difficult
themes we need to know why we are doing it.
The
conversations about these books are more important now than ever especially as
the kids reading them today have friends and parents coming home from very real
wars and suffering the same traumas as their fictional counterparts. I would
never condone the banning of these two books, but I also fervently disagree
with ignoring the greater conversation of why people wish them to be banned in
the first place. The nerve being struck is not to be ignored, there just may be
something there worth thinking about.
I
celebrate Banned Books Week. I support those challenging established ideas, but
I urge everyone to think broadly about why books are banned. Take a look at the
root, have a conversation about it, and judge the merit for yourself. The glory
of Banned Books Week is that you are free both to read what you want to and
bypass what you don’t. That’s FREADOM.
