Banned Books Week brings out lists of books whose controversial content doesn't necessarily stop them from being ... well, sort of tedious.
This article, about books that they really oughta ban made me smile. My first reaction is anti-banning, thought there's some truly sick stuff that kind of should be. But I err on the side of freedom as a rule. In this article, she's joking. Really. She doesn't want them banned, she just wants them not foisted off on kids who will turn off of reading if presented with them because they are Good For You.
But it was hard to relate to this article because in my junior high and high schools, which were considered quality schools, we did not read books.
For serious. We didn't. We got a fat textbook every year, and in it there was usually a full-length work. Not always. Ninth grade had The Odyssey. High School British lit had an edited Romeo and Juliet with the mildly suggestive jokes snipped out. Maybe there was a full-length short work in the mega-textbooks for other years but I don't recall them, and I never encountered a Summer Reading List. Kids in the advanced ability-tracks probably read actual books like she's talking about. The high number of them who got National Merit Scholarships gave the school a great reputation for its rigorous academic demands. Us ordinary kids, who cared? It was thanks to a good elementary school and book-crazy parents that I turned out functionally literate.
So while we think hard about what books to have school kids read, I'd be inclined to say, By the way, DO have them READ SOME.
Meanwhile, I try to read a Famous Banned Book at this time every year, but this year, I had trouble picking one. I haven't started a banned book at all, with the week nearly over. I feel like I've read most of the fun stuff, and I really need to NOT go out and buy more books, so my choices at hand are down to stuff like Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
Or Lady Chatterley's Lover. I'm not joking when I say I'd rather tackle Gibbon. When I read that intro to the Laura Miller article linked above, saying "some classics are painful enough to ruin reading forever," Lady Chatterley was the first thing that popped into my head.
I've tried FOUR TIMES to endure Chatterley, and found that when it's not boring me, it's aggravating me. Lawrence actually got me to like Connie, but the rest of it was unendurable. I can't really review it. I need to actually get through it before I accuse it of stupid ideas. I can accuse it of tedium right now, but I can't yet say whether its .... I'm going to go ahead and say it; whether its heart is in the wrong place. Haha.
This reviewer, however, has read it, and whether he misses its merits or not, his review is laugh-out-loud funny. His language is also unflinchingly graphic, so be forewarned.
There. That's what you get from me for Banned Books Week 2011.
2 comments:
I've read all the books in the Salon article except "A Separate Peace," but none of them were assigned, which probably made a difference. I really enjoyed all of them, and, no kidding, it so happens that I downloaded a copy of Ivanhoe for my handheld reader this very morning. I was trying to think of a book that I just wanted to read again for fun and that was it. Different strokes indeed.
Our "full length" books in Junior High were Evangeline, The Secret Sharer and Great Expectations. The last remains one of my top five novels, the other two were okay but pretty forgettable.
Freshman year, we read "Ethan Frome" and I despised it, but learned the important lesson that teachers rarely choose a book to teach because they want to see if you'll notice that it sucks. Tread lightly and don't use phrases like "Victorian melodrama" in a paper you were hoping to get more than a C on.
But I think things really opened up junior and senior year in high school when we chose the books we read -- Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Ulysses. Good stuff.
I read and enjoyed that Salon article too, and the comments thread that followed was just as entertaining. My own banned book - assigned to high-schoolers, that is - would be The Old Man and the Sea, which is ironic since I now spend several weeks of every year in my second home of Cuba. But OH MY GOD how I loathed that book when it was assigned to us. We also had to write an essay on the metaphors for the life of Christ Hemingway uses in the novel (or is it a novella?), which was just rubbing salt into the wound. Lord, I hate that man, that boat and that damned fish to this day.
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