With Americans’ free speech threatened by politicians’ bluster and federal agents swarming the region, welcome to Banned Books Week. Is there a better time to mark the annual observance of censorship in America?
These are precarious times, indeed, for those who support our First Amendment. To refresh, that’s the one which guarantees freedom of speech and press; Americans’ right to peaceable assembly and to petition our government for redress of grievances.
But, as late-night television hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have found, there’s no certainty in this precarious era while taking potshots at pols. Yet one president, Lyndon Johnson, realized threats to free speech and reading, pointing out in the tumultuous 1960s: “Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”
Which brings us to Banned Books Week. The week, which ends Oct. 11, is celebrated nationally and honors our freedom to read what we want. This despite challenges to volumes on public bookshelves or attempts to ban them from schools and libraries.
A number of Lake County libraries are drawing attention to the week, including the Warren-Newport Public Library in Gurnee, which offered a Monday program, “Banned Books Blackout Poetry” for teens and adults to create poems using words of various banned and challenged books. The library on O’Plaine Road will also be holding “Banned Book Bingo” from 6 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 8.
The Waukegan Public Library has a clever way to mark the week by guessing a banned book by merely looking at its shredded pages in a jar.
The motto for this year’s week is “Censorship Is So 1984: Read for Your Rights”, which is appropriate if one decides to read a previously challenged or banned book. There are plenty.
The 1984 reference is not related to President Ronald Reagan being elected to his second four-year term, although at the time some considered his reign similar to that of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s classic “1984.” Little did those rivals of Reagan, a native Illinoisan, see what would be coming down the political road some 40 years later.
The first Banned Books Week was marked in 1982. It celebrates reading for pleasure into a revolutionary act. Or as acclaimed science fiction author Isaac Asimov noted: “Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”
It also reminds us that censorship, no matter what the media platform, has no place in American society and needs to be defended. Concerted attacks on the freedom to read and access information have grown since the first Banned Books Week was launched.
Chicago-based American Library Association, a prime motivator of the week-long observance, compiles an annual Top Ten list of challenged books, with the most recent ones having LGBTQ content, profanity or are considered by self-appointed censors to be sexually explicit. The ALA says the majority of book censorship attempts now originate from organized movements.
Pressure groups, elected officials and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries, the group says. Officials at the Department of War removed titles this year from schools on military bases that failed to align with executive orders issued by President Donald Trump related to diversity, race and gender ideology. In January, the U.S. Department of Education issued a memo in which it called book bans a “hoax”.
Illinois law limits the authority of schools and public libraries to censor or pull books from shelves. States with the highest rates of book banning include Florida with 2,304 instances; Texas, 1,781; and Tennessee, 1,622.
PEN America, which supports U.S. writers, has also released its list of the most-banned books as Banned Books Week is observed. Works by horror master Stephen King were challenged the most, 206 times.
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According to PEN, the most-banned book in the country last year was Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian novel “A Clockwork Orange,” followed by Patricia McCormick’s 2006 young adult title “Sold,” a fictional account of a girl sold into sexual slavery in India that was named one of the ALA’s best Young Adult novels. Third on the list is another YA novel, the coming-of-age “Breathless” by Jennifer Niven.
Overall, PEN counted 6,870 bans during the past academic year, a slight decrease from the previous year. Some also have sought to remove “The Diary of Anne Frank” from library shelves.
While her Jewish family was in hiding during World War II during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Anne Frank penned her diary. Over the decades since her death in a concentration camp, it has been translated into 70 languages.
The book was required reading in my sophomore year in high school. Don’t remember it being so radical in thought or sexually explicit that it needed to be banned. Who would have thought we were open-minded in the last century?
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
X @sellenews