Once taboo, now treasured
Educators explain reading lists, which include "banned" book
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Mattituck High School librarian Peggy Owens arranges her display of 'banned' books, from 'Catch 22' to 'ttyl,' behind the yellow crime scene tape on Monday to celebrate National Banned Books Week, running through this Saturday.
The librarian at Floyd Memorial Library in Greenport said many "banned books" feature a young person dealing with an adult who is "bossy, stupid and wrong. They grow up and they disobey this wrong person in authority," she said. Adults who feel young people always have to obey authority, she added, would naturally find this frightening.
So Ms. Johnson set up a display of books behind yellow "Do Not Cross" tape for the annual event, which ends Oct. 4 this year.
From the "Harry Potter" series to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the books on display are both classic and new. Some still encounter challenges; others were once banned all together for a variety of reasons -- racism, offensive language or sexism, for example.
But the one thing they all have in common, according to Judith Krug, is their profound importance.
"The books that are challenged are the ones that say something about the human condition," she said.
"For every challenge we know about," she said, "there's about four or five we don't know about."
According to the American Library Association, a "challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school, requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness."
"And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell was the most challenged book of 2006 and 2007. It's about two male penguins who form a couple and eventually raise a chick that wouldn't have lived without their care. The reasons for the challenges were anti-ethnic, sexism, homosexuality, anti-family, religious viewpoint and unsuited to age group, Ms. Krug said.
"It's about love," Ms. Krug countered. "It's about creating a family that wasn't there... It's a lovely story."
Ms. Krug, a career librarian, helped jump-start Banned Books Week in 1982 in cooperation with the American Bookseller's Association. She said that the issues banned books deal with now are much different from those of even 20 years ago, when something like homosexuality was rarely discussed.
"A lot of issues are no longer hidden," she said.
Peggy Owens, Mattituck High School's librarian of 11 years, also has set up a display to celebrate Banned Book Week. She said that most MHS students these days are "very academic" about dealing with subjects like homosexuality. Amanda Barney, coordinator of the MHS English program, agrees.
"They'll read a David Sedaris article in The New Yorker for its literary merits," she said. "Not just for the fact that he's gay."
Ms. Barney said that the goal of MHS's reading lists is to help students answer these questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? What does it mean to be human?
"We present literature under the umbrella of these questions," she said.
The reason her school's curriculum still includes a formerly banned book like J.D. Salinger's ode to teen frustration, "The Catcher in the Rye," she said, is because even with its 1948 copyright, the book still provides students an opportunity to answer those aforementioned questions.
She said many students in 10th grade prefer Toni Morrison's controversial 1970 book "The Bluest Eye." It deals with themes of racism, incest and child molestation, but, ultimately, according to Ms. Barney, it's about beauty and belonging.
Mixed in with the edgy prose, Ms. Barney said, schools still have to teach "the canon" -- classics by "dead white guys" -- in order for students to be well-read. She said college freshman will come back and talk to freshman English classes to describe what they've been reading, and what they appreciated reading in high school.
"They're glad they read 'Oedipus'," she said.
Ms. Owens said that the only time the school had to find an alternative book was a few years ago, when a parent with certain religious views objected to the 1971 book "Go Ask Alice," a diary of a young drug addict.
"Things happen in life," she said. "But the parent wasn't ready to have her daughter read that."
Lisa Navarro, assistant principal and English teacher at McGann-Mercy High School in Riverhead, said she prefers that the students read the more explicit books, like Elie Wiesel's "Dawn," rather than "The Diary of Anne Frank," in order to better understand the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.
"He survived Auschwitz," she said. "[The story] stays with you forever."
Ms. Navarro said that if a parent wants their child to read an alternative to a required book, she will oblige -- but that the child will have to go to the library to read alone while the rest of the class discusses the required book.
Thankfully, she said, she hasn't had to do that yet. Ms. Navarro said that although she's quite conservative on many issues of the day, she believes passionately in "freedom of the press and being able to chose what you read." She likes to gives the students a choice by providing lists with a variety of books.
But Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" is mandatory reading at Mercy. The 1960 classic, still often challenged due to its description of racism, is Ms. Navarro's all-time favorite banned book.
"It's about redemption," she said. "How could you tell me that I can't share that with students? It's a gift."
eschultz@timesreview.com
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