My Summer Reading List

The district where I went to high school rejected a proposal to ban nine books [link]. The books are:

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin
"Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner
"The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World" by Michael Pollan
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Steven Chbosky
"Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers
"How Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised by this. There are a lot of conservatives in that area, but the high school district was very liberal, or at least it seemed to be ten years ago. A lot has changed in ten years. Now, conservatives feel empowered, and believe they have a mandate to take charge of society, driving out of the schools such "controversial" ideas like evolution, sex education, dinosaurs, the laws of thermodynamics, global warming, and pretty much everything else which is in conflict with either the literal interpretation of the Bible, or the ideals of consumerism and ultra-capitalism.

The only books that I have read from this list are "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "The Things They Carried" and there is certainly nothing in any of those books that is more that anyone can see on prime-time network television. The difference, I believe, is the attitude toward violence. It is perfectly acceptable to glorify state violence. On television and in movies, the "good guys" routinely get into shootouts with the "bad guys" and invariably the bad guys are shot, instantly drop to the ground without spilling a drop of blood, and are never seen or heard from again. No one ever suffers. But a book like "Slaughterhouse-Five" (one of my favorite books) is unacceptable presumably because it depicts violence in general in a negative light, and fails to depict the "good guys" as being universally good and the "bad guys" as evil incarnate.

It seems that invariably, when people try to have books banned, it is not because of violence or language. Some of the most violent, graphic books are hardly contraversial. For example, "Lord of the Flies," which I read in my sophmore year of high school, is very violent, but the ideas in that book are not anti-conservative and so they are not controversial.

This is not about violence and language, this is about ideology, plain and simple, and I applaud my high school district for making the right decision. It's a scary thought that a group of people who don't believe in dinosaurs might be able to sieze control of the public schools.