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People who are very bothered by certain books can make a lot of fuss and sometimes restrict reading.
While recognizing that not every book is right for readers of all ages, most parents, polls show, do not want to ban books. In Hermon, Maine, no liberal bastion, parents were asked what access their high school children should have to the school library. According to the Bangor Daily News “82 percent of students are allowed full access.”
Indeed, very few people are responsible for pursuing book bans. According to an analysis of the Washington Post, “The majority of all school book challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from just 11 people.”
When I read that, I was stunned, both because of the power of such a few and in learning about one of the 11.
Jennifer Petersen, a 48-year-old Virginia mother, is among the most prolific book challengers. And, as the Washington Post recounts, Petersen “grew up hating books.” (She also says she’s liked books for about 15 years.)
The more I thought about it, the more this book banner’s childhood experience with reading was telling.
Dear reader, I could not have been more different than Petersen. I went to the library nearly every week and brought home a stack of books. I loved fiction but also biographies, histories, even some science books. Everyone in my family read a lot. My mother was an English teacher and she would talk at dinner about teaching Hamlet and other works. My father had an amazing memory and would discuss with me even minor characters in a novel I was reading and he had read long before.
In reading, I encountered people different from me, living in different times and places and circumstances, sometimes sadly so.
One of my favorite books when I was, I think, 13 years old was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” I reread it many times, the last time a few years ago. Published in 1943, author Betty Smith tells of a family, the Nolans, who loved each other and struggled with poverty, going hungry sometimes.
In the tenement neighborhood where the Nolans lived, there was not much nature. However, the tree growing by the Brooklyn sidewalk mirrored this family’s determination and striving.
Still, this is not a novel with a simple moral or characters. The father, Johnny Nolan, was charismatic and caring but was beset by alcoholism and died young, deepening the family’s hardships. A beloved, generous aunt is a beauty who, in the parlance of the times, slept around. There is harshness and ugliness and cruelty in the book but also love and elegance and grace.
When I read this book, I could see that the Nolan family’s experiences were harder than mine. I was middle-class and did not go hungry. Neither of my parents were alcoholics.
But I not only saw those differences and reflected on the luck of my circumstances of birth. I also appreciated the work for all it conveyed — the plot and character development, its metaphors and other literary devices, the tone and style.
For that is what true readers do. We can be quickly carried away by some books and slowly enjoy others, but we appreciate these works on multiple levels.
Contrast that to what Petersen does when she reads books she might want to challenge. She goes through them and finds passages she deems inappropriate. In 14 months, Petersen identified material on “5.5 percent of the 24,172 pages she read” and used them to target books for removal, the Post reported.
Other book banners contend some swear or sexual words make a book pornographic. Some don’t want minors to read books that might make them sad or have them learn about families different from their own.
If those rules had regulated my reading, I would not have been able to read about the struggles and triumphs of the Nolans.
In picking apart larger works without attention to context or craft, book banners reject what reading is about, how it can illuminate places, times and people like and unlike ourselves. In doing so, they misunderstand reading.
