Censorship in Texas
Stemming from the news about YA poet Ellen Hopkins being uninvited from the Teen Lit Fest in Humble, Texas, Texan Katherine Eliska Kimbriel speaks up.
It's easy to condemn the parent committees for minding their neighbors business, especially when they haven't actually read the book in question. The really vexing question that I see is, what exactly makes a bad book?
In my own view, a badly written book is so trite that I know not only the plot before it happens, I can predict every character reaction, and even swathes of the prose, but a bad book is one that leaves me feeling like the intellectual and emotional equivalent of a bug splat on the windshield of the universe. However, that same book will win many awards, so obviously the entire reading public doesn't agree.
Someone else might point out that a bad book contains dangerous ideas. Mein Kampf is an often-chosen example of a bad book: it not only contains horrific ideas, it's also badly written. Imagine being horrified yet bored, with occasional bouts of total confusion at the flatulent incoherence of the prose, but that was my experience being required to read it in German class, way back when.
Here's the thing I believe: if Hitler hadn't taken over Germany's struggling government, no one would have read that book. Those dangerous ideas were not at all new.
In another post, I want to talk about a writer whose fiction is mostly pretty pedestrian, but whose ideas did have enormous influence--and consequences. And in surprising directions. I wonder if anyone can guess who I mean.
It's easy to condemn the parent committees for minding their neighbors business, especially when they haven't actually read the book in question. The really vexing question that I see is, what exactly makes a bad book?
In my own view, a badly written book is so trite that I know not only the plot before it happens, I can predict every character reaction, and even swathes of the prose, but a bad book is one that leaves me feeling like the intellectual and emotional equivalent of a bug splat on the windshield of the universe. However, that same book will win many awards, so obviously the entire reading public doesn't agree.
Someone else might point out that a bad book contains dangerous ideas. Mein Kampf is an often-chosen example of a bad book: it not only contains horrific ideas, it's also badly written. Imagine being horrified yet bored, with occasional bouts of total confusion at the flatulent incoherence of the prose, but that was my experience being required to read it in German class, way back when.
Here's the thing I believe: if Hitler hadn't taken over Germany's struggling government, no one would have read that book. Those dangerous ideas were not at all new.
In another post, I want to talk about a writer whose fiction is mostly pretty pedestrian, but whose ideas did have enormous influence--and consequences. And in surprising directions. I wonder if anyone can guess who I mean.