Hello, Happy Spooky Season, and Welcome to the Lost Friends Literary Club newsletter!
Today is the last day of Banned Books Week! Did you know? Are you celebrating?
For the uninitiated, Banned Books Week is an awareness campaign that happens at the end of every September, where we celebrate the freedom of information and the freedom to read. People typically think of a banned book as only being banned by a religion or government but Banned Books Week aims to bring attention to the restrictions and removal of books from schools and libraries of all sizes and locations (and to celebrate when those challenged books are still made available).
Started in the early 1980s, Banned Books Week was originally a response to increased challenges, protests, and the 1982 Supreme Court Case Island Trees School District vs Pico. In ITSD v Pico a group of students filed a lawsuit against their school board claiming violation of their First Amendment rights after the school board tried to permanently remove a handful of books deemed inappropriate from the high school and junior high libraries. The Supreme Court basically ruled that school officials can’t ban books just because they don’t like the content, with one judge specifically noting that the First Amendment protects not only the right to express ideas, but also the right to receive them. In this case, that included the right to read library books of the student's choosing.
Since that first Banned Books Week in 1982, the American Library Association and the Office for Intellectual Freedom have fought for the freedom to read books by and about all kinds of people and experiences. Every year, they release a list of the Top 10 Most Challenged books, which read like a who’s who of current cultural events (with eight of 2019’s books centering on LGBTQIA+ stories). While I do think it’s important to mention that most challenges to books come from the obviously well-intentioned goal of keeping children safe, it’s easy to take a look back at the last few years of Top 10 lists and see how those good intentions have come at the cost of censoring stories often told by and about minorities. Far too many censored books have told stories of the things that Americans face everyday: religion, race, LGBTQIA+ issues, and sex education. In a world where kids see all of those things just by consuming media of any kind, wouldn’t it make more sense to allow it in book form, where that content is deliberately broken down for their growing brains to process?
Unless this is the first time you’ve crossed paths with LFLC, you should already know I think we should READ ALL THE BOOKS, especially the controversial ones. Censorship doesn’t do anyone any favors, but it does do harm; when we remove and restrict access to books with content that makes us uncomfortable, we limit what we can learn by only learning from those people and things directly around us. Does that mean we have to agree with every book ever written, or even every book we read? Definitely not! But we do a disservice to ourselves and others when we try to force our own worldviews on others, and refuse to learn about a worldview wider than our own.
Some not-very-fun facts about banned books:
The top five reasons that books get banned or challenged are sex, profanity, drug and alcohol use, LGBTQIA, and “unsuitability to age group.” According to the Office of Intellectual Freedom, LGBTQIA is the fastest growing challenge category since 2000. I take real issue with the “unsuitability to age group” category, because it too often gets used as an easy out or a way to avoid talking to kids about real things happening in the world.
In 2019, the American Library Association tracked 377 attempts to censor library, school, and university materials and services, totaling a whopping 566 books that were challenged or banned.
The last government-sanctioned banned book in US history was a 1749 book entitled “Fanny Hill” or “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” It was banned by Massachusetts courts in 1821 at the country’s first obscenity trial, and remained essentially banned until the case went before the Supreme Court in 1965. You can read all about “Fanny Hill” and her history here.
More reading on banned books and Banned Books Week:
For the entire 2019 Top 10 Banned Books list, look here, and also take a look at the ALA's Banned Books site, where you can find all of the Top 10 lists since 1990, buy Banned Books merch, and report censorship attempts.
Here is a list of the 100 most banned and challenged books of the last decade.
For an easy read about book censorship in the US, try this Wikipedia page.
You can see all of the banned books featured on the LFLC Instagram at this highlight!
My husband listens to more podcasts than any other human on earth, and he suggested this episode of 99% Invisible: Goodnight Nobody, which tells the story of “the unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon.”
For some unrelated reading material, here’s 5 things I’ve read since our last chat:
The entire Wikipedia page for Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, which was the first spooky movie I watched this month.
J.K. Rowling’s latest book in the Cormoran Strike series, Troubled Blood (which I personally think was her best non-Harry Potter book thus far and was also literally nothing like the bad reviews would lead you to believe). In the spirit of Banned Books Week, I understand that Rowling is considered to be very problematic, but I don’t believe in keeping anyone from or shaming anyone for reading anything they want to read. I enjoyed this more than I’ve enjoyed any other book in a long time and my sad brain really needed that respite.
My Three Fathers by author Ann Patchett for The New Yorker. This piece was really just a profile of the fathers in Patchett’s life but I really enjoyed it.
Continuing with the mini-theme of fathers, this tweet which made me roll my eyes and also warmed my heart in the way that only dads on the internet can.
A piece originally printed in the NYT in 1971: What It Means To Be a Homosexual, in which the author just sort of talks through his own gayness in print. It is LONG, and it was a little rambling but as we’ve already discussed above, it is so important to read about the world through a lens that is different from your own.
Our vocabulary word this week:
is not actually a word at all, but a phrase. The term “agony aunt” popped up in multiple things I consumed this week, and it can best be described (for American audiences) as something of a Dear Abby. The phrase is British, and the interwebs describe it as “a writer of an advice column in a newspaper or other periodical; someone commonly consulted for advice about personal problems.” Feel free to use me as your agony aunt, but only as it pertains to book recommendations. I can’t guarantee good advice on anything else.
If you enjoyed this dispatch, please share it with a friend or follow us on social media at the buttons below. Every book I recommend can be found on this Goodreads shelf. If you want to chat, ask for book recommendations, or correct my punctuation, you can reply directly to this dispatch or leave a comment on substack, where you can also find an archive of every dispatch I release. As always, thank you so much for reading!