by Michael Dymmoch
My Ma was a compulsive reader—not her fault. It’s hereditary. My grandmother was a reader. Her mother got in trouble for reading when she was supposed to be working. Maybe that’s why Ma was such a great school librarian. She’d ask a kid about his interests, then find him a book on the subject. And when he returned the book, she’d ask him to tell her how he liked it. She filled her library with plants and bright posters. I still have one she made herself—a fat green dragon announcing “I need a book.”
I grew up with bookshelves full of books. Kids’ books. Adult books. Science and picture books. And we had The Reader’s Digest in the bathroom. Ma never limited my reading. I guess she figured if I was old enough to decipher the words, I’d figure out what to do with them. I must have been in college before I understood the concept of censorship. (I still don’t think I “get” it.)
Ma made me look things up. She must have understood that you have to spell the word to find it in the dictionary, ‘cause she’d often tell me how to spell words. But she wouldn’t give me definitions. She bought an old encyclopedia at a rummage sale and made me use that, too.
Ma had infinite patience with her embryonic novelist. It may have driven her crazy to listen to dialogs I’d memorized from favorite TV shows, but she never let on. She was inordinately proud when I finally published something.
Ma let me and my sibling have pets but she didn’t let us mistreat them. I grew up with questions like, “How would you feel if someone pulled your ears? (or tail? or hair?)” Even ants got respect. (“How would you feel if a giant stomped on your house and killed your family.”) In spite of her fear of such animals, Ma let me keep a donkey (who taught me to be patient with stubborn individuals). When the donkey died, Ma made peanut butter sandwiches (his favorite) for his funeral.
Ma taught me to cook and sew and be helpful, and to understand irony. And she left me with the observation—framed and on my wall now--“People need love most when they deserve it least.”
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Friday, October 05, 2007
Read Banned Books. . .
By Sean Chercover
Ah, the familiar signs of autumn’s gentle approach . . . children playing in the schoolyard . . . the slight chill in the night air . . . the woodsy smell of burning books . . .
Leaves. I mean burning leaves, of course. After all, what kind of idiot would burn books? Probably the same kind of idiot who would try to ban books. The kind of idiot who would demand that libraries and schools and bookstores limit your reading options to only those books that do not threaten said idiot’s worldview.
Yes, it’s Banned Books Week once again, and I’m gonna jump up and down and wave my hands about it, like I do every year. The mouth-breathers haven’t stopped trying to control what we can read, so we can’t stop either. Eternal vigilance, and all that jazz…
The thing is, thousands of groups of our fellow citizens want to “protect” the rest of us from ideas that they have deemed Evil. As you might expect, these Evil Ideas are found in Very Dangerous Books. And our self-appointed moral guardians run around demanding that these Dangerous Books be banned from public libraries and school libraries. And the really frightening thing is, their efforts sometimes meet with success.
From 2000-2005, there were over 3,000 organized attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Harry Potter novels topped the list of evil books. Also in the top ten were Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.
Here are a few more titles, from the top-100 challenged books (1990-2000):
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Native Son
Of Mice And Men
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Catcher In The Rye
In The Night Kitchen (really)
The Color Purple
Brave New World
The Outsiders
James And The Giant Peach
Ordinary People
Lord of The Flies
Song Of Solomon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, The Office for Intellectual Freedom, and a handful of other fine organizations (and endorsed by the Library of Congress), Banned Books Week attempts to draw our attention to an ongoing threat to our intellectual freedom.
So please follow the links in this post, and read Banned Books Week section of the ALA website.
And unless you have something better planned this week, (like, say, burning a witch, or using the constitution for toilet paper) please consider stopping by your local library and checking out a couple of the books on the list.
Free People Read Freely.
Ah, the familiar signs of autumn’s gentle approach . . . children playing in the schoolyard . . . the slight chill in the night air . . . the woodsy smell of burning books . . .
Leaves. I mean burning leaves, of course. After all, what kind of idiot would burn books? Probably the same kind of idiot who would try to ban books. The kind of idiot who would demand that libraries and schools and bookstores limit your reading options to only those books that do not threaten said idiot’s worldview.
Yes, it’s Banned Books Week once again, and I’m gonna jump up and down and wave my hands about it, like I do every year. The mouth-breathers haven’t stopped trying to control what we can read, so we can’t stop either. Eternal vigilance, and all that jazz…
The thing is, thousands of groups of our fellow citizens want to “protect” the rest of us from ideas that they have deemed Evil. As you might expect, these Evil Ideas are found in Very Dangerous Books. And our self-appointed moral guardians run around demanding that these Dangerous Books be banned from public libraries and school libraries. And the really frightening thing is, their efforts sometimes meet with success.
From 2000-2005, there were over 3,000 organized attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Harry Potter novels topped the list of evil books. Also in the top ten were Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.
Here are a few more titles, from the top-100 challenged books (1990-2000):
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Native Son
Of Mice And Men
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Catcher In The Rye
In The Night Kitchen (really)
The Color Purple
Brave New World
The Outsiders
James And The Giant Peach
Ordinary People
Lord of The Flies
Song Of Solomon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, The Office for Intellectual Freedom, and a handful of other fine organizations (and endorsed by the Library of Congress), Banned Books Week attempts to draw our attention to an ongoing threat to our intellectual freedom.
So please follow the links in this post, and read Banned Books Week section of the ALA website.
And unless you have something better planned this week, (like, say, burning a witch, or using the constitution for toilet paper) please consider stopping by your local library and checking out a couple of the books on the list.
Free People Read Freely.
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