Banned Books

[Dave]

I think authors should have a responsibility for what they write.

Science Fiction has always been about the social consequenses of future technology as well as the technological ones.

Stephen King saw something that might happen, expanded on it, and now finds out that he had seen the future. That's not his fault. It shows his brilliance.

Stanley Kubrick withdrew the film 'A Clockword Orange' when he found that teenagers were copying the violence. I don't think that was his fault either, I think the violence would have happened anyway.

I'm happy for authors and directors to decide if their books and films can be released. that is their editorial right. I am less sure whether we need committees deciding on censorship. Especially given some of the examples posted already.

 

[ray gower]

We rarely close a thread here, Jake, because there is always someonr who wakes it up with some new thought or idea.

I've never read Rage, but I can see the motive behind withdrawing the book, it would be painful for somebody close to the events to read. But why read King when there is already so much pain in your life, his books are about pain?
It could also be observed that the damage had already been done by the time it was pulled?

It does however highlight the reason why books are banned and it is well worth remembering:
Books are banned because they offend the sensibilities of somebody
The problem is how many 'somebodys' should it need to decide mass banning?
Whilst Lady Chatterly offended a great swathe of the Victorian and Edwardian public, should we really let a small band of religious fanatics attempt to rebuild the Inquisition because of Harry Potter?

 

[Jake Speed]

It is kind of scary though, King wrote that book over 20 years ago. I could be wrong but I thought that a copy of the book was found in a locker of as student who committed some violence at a school so he pulled it.

I can understand parents wanting to protect their children. My parents never censored anything I read growing up and I read many of the books now banned on my own, outside of school. Of course I did bring home a book once that grandmother disaproved of and eventually got it taken out of the library. It was a little book called "Upchuck Summer." Now while I enjoyed the book and thought it was hilarious, my grandmother disagreed.

 

[ZachWZ]

Fahrenheit 451 (a book about censorship )

In one of the newer editions of this book. Bradbury comments how he's seeing that world coming into being. Not just on the right wing. It;s the left wing that doesn't want stuff that offend minorities. He also tells of how he own works have been changed in reprinting. It's a good little essay.

 

[tokyogirl]

Originally posted by Highlander II




"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, [something] and you know it." -- (we'll get the whole thing eventually)

people are dumb panicky danerous animals! i just remembered this!

anyway....
ok, i am in a young adult lit. class right now and with every book we read we inevitably bring up the discussion of what age the book is appropriate for. my professor teaches both this class as well as the childrens lit class. basically we kind of draw the line in general at puberty. up till then kids just aren't interested in boy/girl tensions or anything deeper than that. so unless it's something they're told they can't read, which makes things almost impossible to resist, they probably would be too bored with it to read it.
when they hit teens...i think to some point what they read should be watched to some degree just because they may not get it. like one book called 'are you alone in the house?' now this book is considered an accelerated reader (it's a program here that maybe not everyone has) and it's listed as a mystery novel. obviously parents did not read the book. this girl keeps getting notes in her locker and threatening phone calls at night while she babysits, which results in some boy she knows from school coming over, knocking her out with a fireplace poker, and raping her. while the book never mentions rape it's pretty obvious what happened. but i have a friend that read it at like age 13 and she totally never got that the first time around. also, i think if parents had actually read the book themselves, it would quickly join the list

 

[Stargod]

I think people who have poor reading comprehension ban books for the one or two lines they read, not because of the overall moral or content of the book.

For example, Lady Chatterley's Lover, you could assume is just about sex, and therefore ban it as distastefull, when in fact it is a very human story about when someone you love changes, for the worst, into a machine like being. How do you feel when take that sexual thread of yarn wind it up into a tight ball so that your soul is just screaming for some sort of loving release. Then what do you do when you find it, and it's not the person your married to? The problem is exacerbated when you happen to be a member of the social elite.

Why ban a book that offers a guide down the brush covered paths of human nature you might not ever have found, without having have blazed your own misbegotten trail?

 

[Stargod]

Another irony about book bannings is the recent huge drop off of young people reading. Some presumed intellectual librarian or school commitee decided that these books should be banned from being read by their children, but then when their kids get home? They certainly don't read books, statistics show that. So what do they do? They get on their X-Box's, N64's, Playstations, and play games full of sexual innuendo, violence and other things which those intellectuals turn a blind eye too. Same could be said for the television they watch. And these people are concerned about the books their kids read? No wonder our society is becomming illiterate. Questionable books wouldn't be a problem if parents talked about them with their kids, or even read with them, and discussed the content, even the questionable content.

 

[ray gower]

Think we need to have a care when trying to decide why books like Lady Chatterly were banned.
Victorian values were the rule at the time and by those standards Chatterly is and was a highly offensive book to those able to read and understand it, about 10% of the UK population at that time. That same body of people made up the ruling class of the time, so it got banned.

The same can be said for Animal Farm and Mein Kampf. They were banned by the ruling class, who would largely be the only people who could be bothered to read and comprehend them.

The problem comes when the chattering classes start to hold forth. Most people couldn't give a damn about any particular book, so it is left to what is usually a very small band of 'fanatic zealots'.

Not sure if we can entirely blame the death of reading on a few banned books though?

IMHO, that is more through the lack of good modern childrens literature. My dog-earred copies of Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh et al are still far more enticing to my grand-children than anything they bring with them.

 

[Stargod]

Not sure if we can entirely blame the death of reading on a few banned books though?

IMHO, that is more through the lack of good modern childrens literature. My dog-earred copies of Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh et al are still far more enticing to my grand-children than anything they bring with them. [/B]

I wasn't implying that banned books are to blame for illiteracy, but given the poor climate for reading, there's no reason to restrict reading in public school today, not 100 years ago (which I think is what you were referencing), because a librarian or mother thought it was distastefull. As I said previously, it's more television, video games, and lack of parental involvement that are to blame for the current trend against children reading. I'd say there's a distint difference between books being banned now, even if they were banned 100 years ago for mostly the same reasons. As someone said, banned books are usually the ones you should be reading.

 

[ray gower]

But Lady C is no longer a banned book!
When it was banned, it was done so because of the national furore from the educated classes. Do there was a reason at the time.
After eighty years somebody finally looked at it again and decided it is actually quite tame.
A bit like the law that required me to have a chap walking infront of my car and waving a red flag, should I wish to drive along the sea front in Llandudno. That bye-law was only repealed in January this year. But as everybody ignored it anyhow, it got forgotten.
Now only the infamy remains to flame popularity. And to be honest, Lady C would be a pretty dull book without its infamy.

Modern bans, however, appear from no where.
Some devil worshipping crackpot claims Harry Potter is bad and sixty libraries have a ceremonial pyre for the books within the week.
There is no debate for consensus and woe on anybody who tries to tell the crackpot to grow up and get a life.

I fear it is one of the limitations created by being a 'free' society.

 

[tokyogirl]

i think harry potter is one of those that cracks me up the most. i mean, if kids are reading, and there's not really any sex, drugs, intense or graphic violence, then what's the problem? kids are reading! i thought that was supposed to be a good thing

 

[ZachWZ]

There is no harry Potter conspiricy. I personaliy don't like the the books but I won't burn them. It's just a few people that think they promote witchcraft. And since their is freedom of the speech they can say what they will. No matter how stupid.

ZachWZ

 

[little smaug]

That is one of the stupidest things I ever heard! And even if Harry Potter does promote witchcraft, it's not exactly encouraging kids to go out sacrificing goats and worshipping the devil.

 

[Dave]

There is a further discussion of this within the Harry Potter forum. The 'book burners' believe that it promotes the use of mind-altering drugs (potions and spells) among other things, and because JK Rowling has said that the ideas just 'popped into my head' then they are obviously the creation of the Devil.

It certainly does not have the strong Christian allegory that you get in other children's fantasy such as CS Lewis, but there is no reason at all why it should. Interestingly, what the 'book burners' overlook is that they do actually celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts School for Wizards.

I think that Harry Potter is simply a victim of it's own success. If it had not become popular it would not have attracted these people to attack it.

 

[tokyogirl]

things like this are always funny to me. take for instance richard peck's book are you in the house alone?. the story is about a girl who gets threatening phone calls while babysitting. later she is raped by her stalker and when she tries to seek justice people in the community want to protect the boy because his family is popular and powerful. The book does not go into any real detail of the rape - the girl gets knocked out and wakes up in the hospital, but any one with a little bit of life experince can figure out what happened to her. Yet this book still ends up on middle school recomended reading lists all the time while books like black beauty get banned.

 

[Dave]

Originally posted by tokyogirl
Yet this book still ends up on middle school recomended reading lists all the time while books like black beauty get banned.

'Black Beauty' gets banned! -- do you know why? That is completely beyond my comprehension.

There are other examples of books with rape and violence in them on school reading lists - 'Noughts and Crosses' by Malorie Blackman is very popular at the moment in schools in the UK. My daughter has read it, but her friend's parents won't let her read it. Does that make me a bad parent? I don't think so. These things happen in real life, you can't protect your children from real life.

 

[imported_malfunkshun]

jumping in here... where exactly are these books banned?

 

[ray gower]

Books get banned everywhere and for all sorts of odd reasons, politics, sensibilities or other.

Lady Chatterly was banned in the UK for being too risque. Mein Kampf because of the activities of one Cpl A Hitler. They more or less make sense, as does Animal Farm in Russia or Noddy in certain UK libraries for more political reasons.

I'm afraid a lot of the more modern and puzzling ones seem to pop up from the US. Harry Potter I know was banned by some of the more bible thumping mid-west states.

 

[imported_malfunkshun]

how the F can a state ban a book? is it illegal to posess a copy of Harry Potter in one of these midwest states? i mean... come on. and about Lady Chatterlys Lover... is it illegal to own a copy in the UK?

 

[Dave]

Not now, but it was banned in the UK for 30 years from it's first release.

But even the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud have been restricted to some degree at some point somewhere.

"100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature
by Authors: Nicholas J. Karolides , Margaret Bald , Dawn B."