The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To Kill A Mockingbird. The Lord of The Flies. The Great Gatsby. 1984.
No, it’s not your grade 10 English syllabus, but a list of some of the most frequently banned and challenged books of the last decade. Books are usually challenged or banned for sexual content, offensive language, material offensive to a religious group, inclusion or mention of homosexuality or references to drug use.
A “challenged” book refers to one that someone (often a parent or school-board member) has attempted to remove from a school or public library, reading list or classroom; a “banned” book refers to a book that was actually removed.
In the past, books were often banned by governments (such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Brave New World, Ulysses and Call of the Wild), but today irate parents are usually the ones who are spearheading the movement.
The list of frequently challenged and banned books is equal parts sex manuals, classics, religious tracts and fantasy novels. It seems almost absurd to think that a book like What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Girls: A Growing Up Guide for Parents and Daughters would be challenged for discussing sex.
Fantasy books, like the Harry Potter series, are frequently under attack, and are usually accused of promoting the occult or Satanism.
While it’s easy to write-off those who seek to ban books as über-conservative helicopter parents, Donna Lynch, the head of the Queen’s Teacher Resource Centre, said she believes otherwise.
“It’s basic fear,” she said, “[Parents] are trying to protect [their children] from an ideology.”
Nonetheless, Lynch said she’s against book banning of any kind and said children shouldn’t be protected from ideas that make them, or their parents, uncomfortable, provided they’re age appropriate.
Lois Lowry’s The Giver, for instance, often comes under fire for its representation of a futuristic dystopia that depicts forced euthanasia, eugenics and humans who are slaves to an unfeeling state.
Rather than shield children from such ideas, Lynch said we should address the issues and discuss them.
Lynch said she is not aware of any books ever having been banned at Queen’s.
Modern readers need to be aware that books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird depict racism but it’s not meant to encourage the reader to mimic this behavior but rather understand where it comes from, Lynch said.
“To deny history is not helpful for the future,” Lynch said, adding that books like these ones are a good starting point for a discussion about how times have changed for the better.
“If we deny [these mistakes], we will probably make the same mistakes over and over again,” she said. The debate gets more contentious when we turn to hate literature with books like Mein Kampf or Holocaust denial literature.
These works are unquestionably vile, but does that mean that it is appropriate to censor them? Lynch’s answer is still no.
“Banning them just gives them credibility,” she said. “It’s best to deal with the issues openly and honestly … we must use education to overcome censorship.”
Hate speech is criminalized under Canadian law, and Ernst Zundel’s 1992 attempt to publish his book Did Six Million Really Die? was quashed by the Canadian government on these grounds.
Lynch said children’s books about politically charged issues, especially with regard to Palestinian-Israeli relations, are today far more challenged than their fantasy counterparts. Three Wishes, a children’s book about Israeli and Palestinian young people by Canadian author Deborah Ellis, was challenged in 2006 by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and remains a touchy book to this day.
Although Lynch has never removed a book from her shelves, she said she’s received complaints about the book, which is part of the acclaimed Silver Birch reading program.
She said banning books is rarely effective, since it usually just increases the book’s popularity. The Catcher in The Rye, a mainstay on many lists of banned books, has long been a symbol of youthful rebellion and certainly hasn’t suffered at all from its inclusion on any challenege books lists.
Banned and challenged books are often classics and often well-written, thought-provoking novels that have been successful in provoking fear because of the very ideas that make them worth reading.
As New York Times writer Alfred Whitney Griswold once memorably wrote, “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”
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