I suppose as someone with a background in publishing, I don’t view challenges to literature in quite the same way that a librarian would in a collection or a teacher would. Remember, in publishing, when you find that an attempt has been made to sensor your books, you breakout the champagne because one thing that always happens is when anyone tries to sensor a book, it sells copies.
Actually, if censors really wanted to be effective, they would just ignore things because that would be a way for them to go away. But the mere bringing of attention to a book in a community or in anyway, will mean that people will buy it. We don’t want to be told what our children can read or what our teens can read, unless we are ourselves make the decision.
I think that at the truth of censorship is that we know that books are powerful. They’re not powerful in the way sometimes that censors understand them to be. Censors read a book and they often think, my teenager’s going to read this exactly the way I read it and there’s no evidence of that at all, you know. But we do know that books have tremendous power and particularly in a society where everything else seems a bit more throw-away and you know shoddily done. And you know, you are only going to look at it once and not even think about it. That sense say no, that book there, can have some power in a child or teen’s life, I think is that, is the undercurrent of why censorship happens. It’s just often very misguided you know and all of us know who’ve watched kids or teens read something. If something disturbs them, if something is outside of their comfort zone, they either don’t read it at all, it’s like it’s not on the page, or they close the book.
That’s the beauty of a book, if you’re not comfortable with it, you don’t ever have to finish it. But I think we do know that there is in that cover, things that change kids lives in a positive way or sometimes censors feel, a negative way. I always say, you know, you talk to criminals you know or, who are behind bars. They never say oh it was that book I picked up and you know it really sent me here.
I mean we talk to people whose lives have gone wrong, they never say, oh it was reading that I did and that’s what happened to me. The sheer act of reading seems to give children and teens a way to evaluate and a way to evaluate whether something is for them or not. But books have power and we all know that at some level.