“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” --Jorge Luis Borges
“Curious George Goes to
the Hospital”: that’s the very first book I remember reading, or having read to
me, or maybe both. At the age of 5 or
so, I was days away from entering the Boston Children’s Hospital for a tonsillectomy,
and I was very scared. Then one day that book arrived in the mail. In a package
addressed to me!
Written and illustrated by Margret
and H.A. Rey, the 1966 book tells the story of how one day George swallows a
puzzle piece and so must go into the hospital to have it removed. Through his
adventures I, and thousands of children, still today, find comfort in this
simple story, and its introduction to young readers about what it’s like to be
in the hospital.
And so, I’ve been reading
books ever since.
I’m an omnivorous reader,
will read anything I can get my hands on. As a kid I used to even read through the
World Book Encyclopedia. In boyhood I remember
reading “Encyclopedia Brown,” a series of books about a boy detective who
solves neighborhood crimes and mysteries.
The thing I loved is that the answers were at the back of the book and
so I got to guess! I recall one night reading a slim paperback on a break from
my very first job, as a 15-year-old clerk at a now long-gone local department
store. Sitting at that soda foundation counter, I sipped Coke and got lost in
the many amazing worlds described in Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories
“The Illustrated Man.” I’ve been hooked on science fiction ever since.
It’s mystical and a
miracle that some books, the memory of those books: these stay with us, because
in profound and simple ways, they changed how we looked at the world and ourselves.
That’s what great books do. They open our minds and invite us to experience peoples,
ideas, histories, and beliefs we might never have encountered without a book to
take us on an exotic journey. A book to invite us on exciting trip of the mind and
the imagination.
I wish I could listen as you
talked about the books that have shaped and changed your life.
Was it Nancy Drew
mysteries that got you to fall in love with reading or perhaps Judy Blume’s “Are
You There God? It’s Me Margaret” …that story made you feel not so alone in the
world. Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography
of Malcom X”—did that wake you up to the pain of so many of our fellow children
of God? Were you as blown away as I was by Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a slim volume
that tells the tale of the Holocaust through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy.
His description of seeing the flames leap out of the top of chimneys as he
approached by train car the concentrations camp: it still haunts me.
Books: yet for all they
make this life better, and expand minds and hearts, still some books don’t always
inspire curiosity. Instead, some books inspire fear, even censorship. That’s
what happened last month in McMinn County Tennessee, where the school board
voted unanimously to remove the book “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum
about the Holocaust. According to
minutes from the board’s meeting it took this action because of their concerns
about questionable language and depictions of nudity in that Pulitzer Prize-winning
graphic 1991 novel, written by Art Spiegelman. I don’t deny that board’s right to make such a
choice. I do mourn the fact that kids in that place won’t be able to be moved
by the poignancy and power of “Maus,” at least in the classroom.
It's not just “Maus” that’s
provoking such actions to remove “controversial” books from schools, libraries,
and classrooms. According to the American Library Association, 2021 set a record
for the number of book challenges brought by parents, school boards and other
groups. Books removed from American libraries include “A Handmaid’s Tale” by
Margaret Atwood, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and “The Hate U Give” by
Angie Thomas.
Funny thing is that
immediately following the story of “Maus” being banned, it shot to the top of
Amazon’s best seller list. Just goes to show you can’t ever fully censor or squelch
or deny the truth that books contain. Can’t erase the history that books tell
us about, even when those stories might make us feel uncomfortable or even
guilty. Can’t for long keep down any book, not with so many places to find and to
buy and to read books.
Bans are often temporary,
of the moment, but books? The ideas they contain within are eternal. Thank
God for books, for every single book, from the Bible to the bawdy, from the
profound to the trivial, from the controversial to the child-like. Like “Curious
George.”
Happy reading!
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