*A note before reading- this post was intended to release in September but ironically enough, I decided to not post it.*
September sure is a month for books. I celebrated Random Acts of Publicity Week after Labor Day and just recently discovered that the last week in September is traditionally Banned Books Week. This widely celebrated week recognizes books that are commonly banned or challenged for various reasons. Reading about banned books got me thinking. Why do we ban books? I mean, people are entitled to communicate stories through novels. Books are just like music, movies, radio, television, and other common forms of media which also may sometimes face some censorship. But more often than not it seems that books are the medium which face the most critical treatment. But why books? If people have an issue with a piece of literature they could simply not read it, right? The answer is far from that simple and I think an answer might lie in what we've talked about in my history class: identity.
We all have an individual and societal sense of identity whether it's in a social, political, intellectual, religious, or economic sense (or SPIRE as my teacher says.) We have a notion of who we are and what makes us who we are. Beyond the color of our hair, ethnicity, height, and other aesthetic qualities we all have defining traits and ideas. If books and other communication mediums contradict our ideas, maybe we take offense to those things and feel compelled to remove them from our lives altogether. If things are offensive or incorrect, it makes sense to ask for factual accuracy. This argument is highly complex and multifaceted but some of the books on the list are questionable: American literary classics can be found on the list with titles like J.D Sailnger's The Catcher in the Rye and also J.K Rowling's Harry Potter books.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share, feel free to comment on this post.
