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I published a story back in 2013 (it does not seem that long ago) called 'Promises can get you into trouble'. As the story nears its climax, I floated the idea about a number of US States banning the books that had been written by the main character who was Trans.
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/46574/promises-can-ge...
Fast forward to 2021 and in the wonderful (sic) state of Texas, they are trying to ban around 800 books from School Libraries. These books have been deemed to be unsuitable for children because they may make them feel uncomfortable.
The list of titles includes
V - for Vendetta
The Handmaids Tale
The Cider House Rules
It appears that what I foretold is coming true. I wish it wasn't.
Samantha
Comments
A book I read ...
... many years ago and affected me so greatly that I doubt I could read it again is 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck. I can imagine that being on the list. It's a far deeper book than the more popular (and shorter IIRC) 'Of Mice and Men' by the same writer.
Here in the UK we are experiencing a similar situation to California in the 1930/40s where we need cheap, foreign (ie Eastern European) labour to pick crops (and drive lorries) but want them gone once their work is done because of xenophobia and, of course, Brexit.
R
Temporary workers
are a fact of life now. To me, if they do a good job and want to stay then I'd let them.
I've had a lot of work done on my house recently and most of it was carried out by Polish (plumber and electrician) and Romanian (bricklayer and plasterer) tradespeople.
They all worked very diligently and did a great job. I have no complaints at all. Indeed, many local trades simply don't want to quote for the business or if they come around to view the job, you never hear from them again. It can't take much to send an email telling me that they aren't going to quote but no, they don't.
Back to the topic of my post.
Those two titles may well be on 'the list'. I'd expect that 'Catcher in the Rye' would be there as well. I read that aged 14 and it was an eye-opener. I learned a lot about life from that book. It is a shame that parents today want to coddle their children in 1000 layers of cotton wool. Those poor kids enter adulthood with zero experience of what the real world is like.
Samantha
Catcher in the Rye
It would be quite funny if the Texans were to ban it from school libraries.
Over here in Germany it was part of our highschool syllabus in english in the 80s (and probably still is).
Mandatory reading here, banned there – in the land of the free.
It's ironic
I heard, so I can't say it's fact, that Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and Brave New World is on that list they are trying to ban.
Strangely enough the "Anarchist Cookbook" which used to be banned isn't.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
more of the usual suspects
when it comes to apparently 'subversive' works.
Texas is well on the way to actually becoming a Big Brother state. Strange that the ruling party trumpets small government when Austin is getting more and more power.
How long before they start banning e-books from being downloaded into Texas?
Samantha
Nothing new
This is nothing new. Book-banning has been going on in the USA for a very long time. I've been hearing about it all my life. The American Library Association has lists of them.
More like they make the parents and other adults uncomfortable.
That's the Difference, Sort Of...
...unsuitable for children because they may make them feel uncomfortable.
Banning books because adults don't want their children to be exposed to the ideas in them has been a staple just about forever here. (And to be fair about it, here we're discussing school libraries, where parents wouldn't have any feedback on what their children are being reading; at best they'd be trusting a school librarian about whom they know next to nothing.)
But if they're really doing it out of concern about children's own discomfort and not as an excuse for the same old repression, that's a different tack -- and a much more "modern" approach that would cover a whole different range of concepts.
Eric
Banning Books
Samantha, you wrote that story prior to Covid. Covid is really just a smoke screen for the actual virus which is stupidity. Seems like there are a lot of loud mouth people with their heads up their behinds.
Elder perspective
Back in the days of Falwell the first and his (Im)moral majority the conservative Christian community had a problem with their children being exposed to impure ideas and beliefs in college. He created Liberty University so they get a degree while remaining sheltered intellectually. These children are now adults. They have been taught (programmed) to work towards limiting available reading material to the king James translation of the Bible and the institution of conservative evangelical Christianity as our mandatory national religion.
This belief system has been present since before our revolution. The puritans didn’t come to America to escape religious persecution so much as to be able to persecute (successfully) non-puritans. Conservative evangelicals are their ideological heirs.
Remember the prayer in schools issue (if you’re old enough). Up until that local school boards could quietly violate the constitution adlib.
BAK 0.25tspgirl
A safe prediction
Unfortunately predicting the banning of books is almost as safe as predicting the sunrise tomorrow. I remember a big fuss locally when a conservative preacher insisted that the Harry Potter books be removed from the school and municipal libraries. For a period in the eighties you had to cross a picket line from James Dobson's asshole brigade to enter one local bookstore because they refused to let them censor their merchandise ( I admit it. I enjoyed walking right into them like they weren't there if they deliberately got in front of me.). It's more about "look at me" than it is about protecting children.
googled...
googled it and the 8th position was "books banned in us schools" showing
Banned & Challenged Classics
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker.
Ulysses, by James Joyce.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
Not quite as it seems...
Yes, those books are on the chopping block, but according to Newsweek, some of those aren't from conservative bans... but bans called for from those on the left for being 'hate speech'.
From Newsweek: the notice that went out to the Burbank Unified School District
"Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry."
Further from Newsweek:
"Four progressive parents alleged that "speech is violence" and these books could cause harm to their children, and, in turn, BUSD decided to exclude these novels from its curriculum."
Be cautious of anyone that wants to deny knowledge. (in case anyone doubts the accuracy... here is a link corroborating the trend)
https://www.startribune.com/the-woke-left-wants-to-erase-cla...
Huckleberry Finn
was put on that list for one reason only, the use of the word that was then used to to describe a black person.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
There is a scene in the movie Indiana Jones And the Last Crusade
Where Indiana and his father are in Berlin and they see a group of Nazis burning books. One of the best lines I have ever heard is when Professor Henry Jones turns to his son and says, “My boy, we are pilgrims in an unholy land.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Every time this topic comes up
I hear this catchy little number in my head,
from Utopia's 1982 album Swing to the Right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCT3eAfs_Zc
(And the album cover is taken from an actual news photo,
if not of a book burning then back during the 1970's craze
of burning "satanic" rock albums that had demons in them)
~hugs, Veronica
"Government will only recognize 2 genders, male + female,
as assigned at birth-" (In his own words:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lugbpMKDU
"If played backwards"
I remember back then, there were some LP records that were reported to have messages from Satan if you played them backwards.
My brother had the record in question and as our mother never threw away anything we found an old record player in the basement I was able to modify to reverse the direction the record spun. As you would expect, there were no messages just garbled music played backwards...LOL
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Play country & western records backwards
and you get your job back, your wife back, your pick up and your dog back.
that joke...
That joke brought a few chuckles 50 years ago.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
There are quite few books
Several of the books mentioned by others here are very familiar, they keep popping up as controversial. There are quite few books, that have been repeatedly on banned lists, and also assigned in school. You can also add books like, "Harry Potter" & other fantasy stories, for being Satanic or at least anti-religion, it seems everything always offends somebody.
So this is not exactly a new trend.
:(
Strangely funny
Apparently not all schools and teachers agree with the list of books that should be banned from public schools.
My 14 year old told me that her teacher is having them read Fahrenheit 451 and that they had to choose one other dystopian novel to read for class. She asks for my suggestions, of course 1984 came immediately to mind with how controlling the US government has become.
She was quite interested in reading 'Giver' and 'The handmaiden tale' two of which I don't have and will see about obtaining this weekend for both of us to read.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Bringing up the subject
In almost 22 years of running this site, I've removed only one story. And that one was removed not for its content but for the author's stated purpose in posting it as a means of disrupting the site. He dared me to remove it. Eh, don't do that unless you want a lesson in irony.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I believe that literature should be free
of censorship. I'm old enough to remember when 'Lady Chatterley' was banned here in the UK.
About half of the books mentioned so far were new to me in my final year of secondary school 1968. Before I left school in June 1969, I'd read most of them. No questions about suitability or making me feel uncomfortable. Reading them was part of me growing up.
Samantha
of course
putting anything on a 'banned list' is sure to spark more interest than it would otherwise get. Others may disagree but persinally i think Lady C is a godawful book but its censorship ensured far more readers than would've read it had it been freely available.
I've read many of the titles mentioned, some, 1984 and Animal Farm for instance as part of the school curriculum. To my mind Shakespeare is far more subversive and dodgy, since the mid 20thC every child in the UK has read one if not several as part of the curriculum - result - lots of bored kids, no increase in poisoning girlfriends or adultery!
People are either readers or not readers, you'll never stop the former and the latter go through life without the written word influencing their worlds.
Now banning books for being poorly written, that i can go with - I guess that's the Bible and Koran out then!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Oh dear... I am a failure then
I've never read any of the Bard's works. It wasn't on the reading list for us numpties at Ifield School in the last 1960's.
I only read LC because our set book was the collected short stories of D.H. Lawrence.
Samantha
I'm a bit older than you ...
... Samantha (b 1940) and I certainly remember it well. It's quite tame by modern standards. As a teen and twenty I read just about all of Lawrence, mainly perhaps, because I know the area intimately - I was born and raised fewer than 200 metres from where he was born! To my father's generation 'O warra dotty bogger' (he was a dirty bugger) but he certainly knew the temperament of people (though slightly exaggerated, I suppose).
Interesting that 'Huckleberry Finn' was banned because of the use of the 'n' word, which was common at the time it was written. I suppose eventually the stigma will die away but it may take a century. It's still a great book and it even has a relatively short transgender episode when Huck pretends to be a girl. He's discovered when his hostess tosses him something when he's seated and he pulls his legs together to catch it as a boy in trousers would when a girl in a dress would do the opposite.
R
Banning of Huckleberry Finn
More to the point, it was the usual word in the time when the story was set, which was at least 30-40 years before when it was first published. To use any other word would have been quite unrealistic, as his readers would have well known.
And I suspect it was (and sometimes is) actually banned, not because people actually believe that the book is racist, but because it reminds people of the racism and other legacies of slavery that are still around today, and which people in the USA for the most part want to ignore or sweep under the rug as fast as possible.
The Handmaid's Tale
As I was curious, I looked up an official list of literature for highschool english in Germany – "The Handmaid's Tale" is among them, still deemed valuable enough to be used in teaching the next generation.
The other side of the coin
Compulsory reading may backfire as well as banning.
As a result of compulsory reading of books that I really wasn't mature enough to read, at that stage, there are swathes of literature genres I will not touch.
Very true
but IMHO, the fruits of the forbidden carrot are far more tempting to a hormone overloaded teenager.
Samantha
His Dark Materials
by Philip Pullman was, I believe, banned by the Catholic church. Book one was filmed as The Golden Compass but I heard at the time that they prevented the second and third books being made into films. Pity, I enjoyed reading them and also listening to them on BBC radio 4. The later TV series was quite good as well, but I'm almost always disappointed by any TV or film adaptation of books I've read - e.g. Lord of The Rings.