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Banned Books

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

On Tuesday Lara made mention in her blog of the BBC Book List Challenge – that list currently doing the internet rounds of the 100 absolute must-read books. If however, you feel that with your job, your other books, and the TV, the leaky tap, the school runs, the nightly naps, and emptying the bin, you haven’t the time to conquer a socially-respectable percentage of that list, then I offer you a much easier challenge: to read the Top Ten Most Complained About Books! That is, the ten books that drew the most complaints from American parents in 2010, as compiled by the American Library Association and reported on this week by the Guardian – read more here…

The list is eclectic and holds a few surprises: topped by a sweet-looking children’s book about gay penguins (pictured), and rounded off by the international sensation Twilight, wedged somewhere in the middle is the only classic on the list, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – which incidentally also comes in at number 56 on the BBC’s list. And the reasons for the parental moans are equally diverse, ranging from the predictable to the (sadly) laughable. While most of the ten set alarm bells ringing in the heads of prudish parents due to their sexually explicit content and offensive language, other causes of complaint appear to be the mere mention of homosexuality or drugs, while divergent political opinions and religious sensitivity is evident in the complaints against others, such as Twilight (reminiscent of one Church of England school’s attempted ban on Harry Potter).

It all reminds me of an aggressively defensive woman who a few years ago stormed into the library I was then working in and demanded in rather louder than hushed tones to know whether we had Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Before I could even click ‘search’ on the catalogue she launched into an evidently oft-regurgitated speech of pure righteous indignation about the injustice of ‘them’ stopping people reading D. H. Lawrence, and how this was a free country and ‘they’ can’t tell us what we should and shouldn’t read. Remarks to the effect that Lady Chatterley’s Lover hadn’t been banned in decades, and that we did happen to have the book available did nothing to mollify my assailant. She marched in the direction I frantically waved her in, found the book, slapped it on the desk for stamping, spun with it through the turnstile gate, and handed it – I swear on Tolstoy’s trousers this is true – to her waiting daughter, who looked not a day over twelve, saying ‘Right, there’ as she did so.

And so the moral of this story is – parents! When directing your offspring’s reading habits: neither a weirdo nor a puritan be.

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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