Banned Book Week - A meme post
joknowles, author of Lessons from a Dead Girl, which has been banned, and Jumping off Swings, has proposed the following Banned Book Week meme:
1. Go find your favorite banned book.
2. Take a picture of yourself with said book.
3. Give that book some love by explaining why you think it is an important book.
4. Post it to your blog.
5. Spread the word!
Making a choice was tough, because I am so fond of so many. But I finally had to go with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
I had to go with Huxley's because it's a book I remember reading when I was very young--12 maybe, young enough so that I didn't understand everything I read, but old enough to understand the gist of it and old enough to borrow something of its spirit the next spring when we had to write a story about a cluster of frogs' eggs. My story was about a future time when people lived in isolated pods, having no contact with other people, receiving all their food through chutes. It was a dystopia, although I didn't know it at the time, and I remember the student teacher (the first male teacher I ever had) telling me that what I had written wasn't perhaps all that far-fetched. I remember nodding politely (I was a good girl then), but thinking to myself, 'well duh, I know that. I'm not stupid, you know.' (All right, I was externally a good girl. Internally I was a snarky thing.)
Brave New World is important, though, because it asks us to question--authority, science (he proposed test tube babies before they were feasible), but also the power of people, which does run the danger of turning into mob rule. It's not a pretty story at all, and not even a hopeful one. But it is important. It was for me, it made me think.
Not that I necessarily believe in Huxley's dark vision. But I do think the possibility is there, in all of us. As is the possibility of the opposite. Because, even though at that age I felt like one of my people in the frog's egg, isolated, I have come to believe in the importance of contact with other people (it's a lot easier when you can feel safe with them). Also, while I don't believe this is inevitably the best of all possible worlds, I do believe that if enough people can draw on their better instincts, we can make the world a better place. It just won't be easy.
That's my banned book story. Now I'm going to figure out which one of the top ten most challenged books for 2009 I will make my reading for the week. I'm thinking Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is one of three I have yet to read. Tango Makes Three and Twilight are the other two and I'm not in a vampiric mood.
How about you? What's your favorite/most important banned book? What are you reading for Banned Book Week?