MarysLibrary

Banned Books Week - 4

So why do people want books banned? And are they all closed-minded bigots?

No, some of them are closed-minded lunatics. Here's a list from the ALA of the strangest reasons for people to request that books be removed from the shelves:

Ten most farfetched (silliest, irrational, illogical) reasons to ban a book.

1. “Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” ( A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstien)
2. “It caused a wave of rapes.” ( Arabian Nights, or Thousand and One Nights, anonymous)
3. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” ( Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)
4. “Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” ( Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” ( Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)
6. “The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” ( Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)
7. “One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.” ( The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)
8. “It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” ( Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)
9. “A female dog is called a bitch.” ( My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)
10. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” ( Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)

I do sympathize somewhat with the parent who voiced the objection in # 1.

Banned Books Week - 3

Various people have questioned the sale or use in schools of many different sorts of books. Here is a list of books banned or challenged, among them some of the finest books published in the 20th century. Of Mice and Men seems to win the prize for the largest number of challenges. It was totally banned from Ireland in 1953.

Banned Books Week - 2

Here are the books that were most often attacked in 2009.

1. TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series) by Lauren Myracle

2. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson 

3. The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 

4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee 
 
5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer 

6. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 

7. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult 

8. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things by Carolyn Mackler 

9. The Color Purple Alice Walker 

10. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

The Burry Man's Day

I want to visit Queensferry, a lovely town at the end of the Forth Bridge which has got to be seen, I suspect, to be really appreciated. Queensferry is the setting for Catriona McPherson's second Dandy Gilver mystery, The Burry Man's Day (2006) which is how I heard of it. I went to Undiscovered Scotland and learned more.

Dandy, who is visiting friends near Queensferry, attributes to the bridge the direction her life has taken.

... staying at a house party in Derbyshire during my coming out season, I had been unable to sleep ... out of sheer boredom. ... On my bedside table the selection of reading matter comprised Volume Two of a three-volume Victorian romance ... something initially enticing with a new and brightly coloured jacket which turned out to be a history of Nottingham and, finally, The Flower of Scotland: Great Engineering Feats of the Century. (I see now that the pitifulness of such a library at the bedside of a debutante doing her Season was not accidental. It was intended to send a gentle little message about getting married as quickly as possible or ending up an embittered spinster with a knowledge of Nottingham far beyond what could ever be needed.)

The next evening when she finds herself at dinner seated next to a reserved Scotsman from Perthshire and floundering about for something to talk about Dandy happens on the subject of the bridge.

One can only assume that reading the stuff while dropping off engraved it upon my brain like the grooves of a gramophone record, because out it all poured: weights of girders, numbers of labourers, depth of foundations . . . the lot.

So I can see why this dour individual, this stern devotee of solid building and proper maintenance, this Hugh Gilver as he turned out to be, must have thought he had just met the first serious-minded woman of his life. ... Thus, you see, I can blame the Forth Bridge almost entirely for my finding myself now, Mrs High Gilver, listener to plans of drain improvements, helpmeet in projects of pond construction, and mother to two little chips off the same dour Scottish block.

So it's not surprising that she frequently travels about without her husband. And here she is in Queensferry in 1921 during the annual Ferry Fair. The highlight of the fair is the appearance of a man entirely covered with burrs who goes about asking for coins for charity and is required to take a drink of whisky at each stop. (This I expect is an actual Queensferry tradition as it's beyond the skill of any novelist to invent such a thing.) The man who has been playing this part for 20 years falls down dead later in the day and Dandy doesn't think it's a heart attack.

Dandy calls her friend Alec who helped her solve the mystery of the missing diamonds in the first Dandy Gilver mystery, After the Armistice Ball, and between them they interview the dead man's family, neighbors, and possible witnesses to peculiar activity on the day of the death. Particularly helpful is an old lady whom Dandy finds spreading egg shells around the base of cabbage plants to keep the snails away. Having spent much of the summer doing that and other things to keep the slugs away from my hostas I was much taken with the crusty old dame.

But then I'm taken with all the Dandy Gilver mysteries and have bought from abe.com those that my public library doesn't have. More reviews to come of Bury Her Deep, The Winter Ground, and the rest of McPherson's delightful series.

 

Banned Books Week - 1

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Once again it's that time of year when the library community addresses an increasingly important issue: the attempt to ban books.

For a while the issue of banning books had been reduced to the ludicrous. Some years back parents of students at Mark Twain Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, wanted to ban from the school library and the classroom Huckleberry Finn, leading most of us in the community puzzled and a bit amused. They were unsuccessful.

But recently there have been an appalling number of incidents where books have been withdrawn from bookstore shelves, and from publication (by Random House), because they were offensive to Islamists. Our Muslim neighbors have no more right to demand that books that offend them be prevented from being published or removed from bookstore or library shelves than I have the right to demand that books offensive to Christians be banned. No one may abridge our freedom of speech in America. 

Wow

E-book Sales Jump 150% in July

After increasing by "only" 118% in June, e-book sales jumped 150.2% to $40.8 million at the 14 publishers that report e-book sales in July. Sales for the first seven months of the year were up 191% to $219.5 million.  -- Publisher's Weekly Daily, 22 Sept 2010

The 20s

It started with Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paul Byrne, just published, which is, "A terrifically engaging and original biography of Evelyn Waugh and the family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited." I decided this subject needed a little more investigation so I got a copy of Madresfield: The Real Brideshead (2008) by Jane Mulvaugh, which was rather better than one might expect of such a specialized book. I suppose anything touching the Waughs shares the shimmer of wit and rapier thrusts of that family.

I had bought Alexander Waugh's 2008 book, Fathers and Sons: An  Autobiography of a Family when it was first published so I read that next. It was of course very clever and I learned some things I hadn't known about the Waughs.

  After I read that book I went back to Waugh's novels, Decline and Fall (1928), which is a bit jejune for us today but which was quite shocking and terribly amusing in its day, and Vile Bodies (1930), which was a bit better. Or perhaps I was by then a bit more accustomed to the off-hand satiric 20s style. Next will be Black Mischief (1932), which my database tells me is in Box 102 in the attic.

About this time I started to get interested in the 20s and 20s as a  background to Waugh's early work and I moved on to Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (2010), which turned out to be amusing and informative, if not particularly pertinent to my interest in Waugh. It was there that I learned that "between 1913 and 1928 the amount of fabric used to dress a woman fell from 19 1/4 yards to 7."

About then I watched De-Lovely, the movie about Cole Porter, which got me interested in Gerald and Sarah Murphy, the people about whom Fitzgerald was thinking when he said, "The rich are different from you and me." (To which Ernest Hemingway was reported to have said: Yes, they have more money." Unfortunately, he never said it, thought it is the sort of thing he would say.)

I then read Amanda Vaill's Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story(1998), which is one of the best books I've read in months. The Murphys were charming in the extreme and very generous with their money but life was cruel to them: they lost both their sons in their early teens and they never entirely recovered from the loss. This is a book to read for the joy of the writing and to learn about those gay years before the depression when all the novelists writing in English knew one another and they all knew the Murphys. 

 It seemed then to be time to re-read A Moveable Feast, the book  Ernest Hemingway wrote about his youth in Paris but which he never finished. His wife at the time he died arranged the pieces, adding and dropping those she liked or disliked, and so we don't really have Hemingway's book at all. However, a new, "restored" edition has just been published and although it isn't really restored at all since it never really existed, at least it's a bit different and has new material. The new material includes a scathing bit on the Murphys whom he describes as callous and destructive. No one else saw them that way and even F Scott Fitzgerald, who used them as the basis for the characters in Tender Is the Night (1934), was particularly critical of them.

Next? I've ordered Janet Flanner's Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939 (1988), a collection of Flanner's pieces for the New Yorker magazine, which she signed "Genet."

I'm not sure where to go from there. Any suggestions?

The Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist

Here's the Giller Prize longlist, with the usual "controversial" books, which means trendy, pro-multiculturalism, and anti-Judeo-Christian tradition. I say this from reading the reviews as my library has only The Debba and The Imperfectionists and, alas, most have not been published in the US as yet. The shortlist will be announced on 5 October.

• David Bergen for The Matter With Morris

• Douglas Coupland for Player One

• Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge

• Alexander MacLeod for his short story collection Light Lifting

• Avner Mandelman fo The Debba 

• Tom Rachman for The Imperfectionists

• Sarah Selecky for her short story collection This Cake Is For The Party

• Johanna Skibsrud for The Sentimentalists

• Cordelia Strube for Lemon

• Joan Thomas for Curiosity

• Jane Urquhart for Sanctuary Line

• Dianne Warren for Cool Water

• Kathleen Winter for Annabel

Leaving Rock Harbor

The other day when Hurricane Earl was heading for southeastern New England, Providence TV's Channel 7 interviewed the harbor master in New Bedford, the city where I was born and where I went to high school. Many years ago they built a large and expensive hurricane dike to protect New Bedford Harbor and after the predictable complaints about the cost and some six or eight years of no need for it some people considered it a boondoggle.

But when Earl looked like he was going to make landfall at the mouth of the Acushnet River (he eventually went to Nova Scotia instead) there were boats from all over the coast heading to New Bedford because, as a sailor from a gorgeous tall ship out of Baltimore said, New Bedford's harbor is more sheltered than the others around there and with the dike . . .

They showed photos of the New Bedford fishing fleet, every boat of it in the harbor in anticipation of the storm. The young reporter went on about how the boats were berthed four, five, and six deep along the wharf. Imagine that!

Hard indeed to imagine for those of us who remember the harbor in the 1950s. In those days Fisherman's Wharf and the State Pier were lined like that every day when three quarters of the fleet was out fishing George's Bank. How the mighty have fallen!

New Bedford has gone through this boom and bust three times over the last 350 or so years, starting with whaling, which was once the city's major industry with a fleet of some 500 whaling ships. For a time the city had the largest per capita income in the country based on whale oil.

But Spindletop put an end to the hunting of sperm whales (just in time for the whale population) and the money from whaling went into big cotton mills that for a time made New Bedford the place where much of the country's fine cotton cloth was manufactured. (Think Wamsutta and Berkshire Hathaway.)

In the 1920s  and 30s unions were formed in New England textile mills after the post World War I drop in cotton prices and a resulting drop in wages for mill workers. And the money and the mills went to North Carolina. It was easier to build a new mill with up-to-date equipment down there than to upgrade the old mills in New Beford, Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence and the workers were not as unionized in the south.

It is during that time when the mill owners were manipulating wages and the workers were out on strike that the climax of Rebecca Chace's new novel, Leaving Rock Harbor, takes place. The major characters are Winthrop Curtis, the son of a wealthy mill owner, Joe Barros, the son of Portugese immigrants who works in the mills after school and on weekends, and Frankie Ross, the daughter of a skilled mill worker, an immigrant from Britain, who has come to Rock Harbor from upstate New York to find work as an engraver.

Because his father has political ambitions, Winthrop goes to the public high school where he becomes friends with Joe and Frankie. Both boys fall in love with Frankie and the relationship between these three reflects the political tensions between the city's various populations of French Canadian, Portugese, and English immigrants and the predominantly Yankee mill owners.

My grandfather, an Irish immigrant, worked in the cotton mills as a jacquard weaver, and I've heard many tales of those days when Anne Burlak, "the Red flame" was organizing workers for the Communist Party. Chace's book brings those days vividly to life.
 

Elsewhere

Last month there was an article by Gabrielle Zevin in the New York Times about how adults, adults with no children of their own, are reading children's and young adult books for their own pleasure. The author pointed out that many books written for children have become popular with adults lately, including the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, not to mention the Harry Potter books.

I've been reading some of those books myself of late. The Hunger Games(2008) was recommended to me by a librarian and although it's not my sort of book (dystopian thrillers have never been my first choice in fiction) I enjoyed it. The Lightning Thief(2005), recommended by my niece whose 6th grader is reading it for school, is the first in Riordan's series about a lad, the son of Poseidon, who has to make his way in a contemporary world where the gods and monsters of Greek Mythology have moved Olympus to the top floors of a NY office building. I liked that one, too.

So I requested Zevin's YA book, Elsewhere, from the library. This is the story of a teenager who is hit by a car and ends up . . . elsewhere. In this place without a name people who die "live" their lives backwards until, as day-old babies, they return to earth. Reincarnation with a whimsical twist. It's a delightful fantasy and despite my distaste for New Age reincarnation drivel . . . I liked it.

Other authors mentioned in Zevin's article include Susan Cooper, whose Dark Rising sequence is popular with both adults and children, and Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl (2001) my 17-year-old neighbor recommended a while back. I picked up Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book when my blogging friends were reading and enjoying it - and I liked it too. Like all the rest of these books it is fantasy with ghosts and other supernatural creatures thrown in. It's very good.

What is it about our world today that sends so many children, and lots of adults, to the fantasy world for their fiction? Is it because so many excellent books are being written in that genre? Or are these fine writers choosing to present us with these fantasy worlds because they are in such demand?