Banned Books and Urban Revitalization

Unfortunately, I don't have much to say about urban revitalization. I grew up in one of the most rural states of the Union (I could easily go off on a tangent about Union/Confederacy and how West Virginia re-seceded, but I'll spare everyone the trouble), meaning that I have almost no experience with urban revitalization, homelessness, etc. I did, however, post about the exact same article as the group used, about the homeless and the downtown Madison library, on November 18th. So yeah, I think I will let that stand as my discussion of that topic.

Now for the other topic, that of banned books. Naturally, as an avid reader, I have much stronger feelings about banned books than I have about other topics. I don't believe that books should be banned, although I do believe that some books should perhaps not reach the hands of some people. One example would be that I would prefer that criminals not have access to The Anarchist Cookbook. Interestingly, I have reservations about letting children read books like Lolita or Anna Karenina, and yet having read (most of) Anna Karenina, I don't think that it would harm children to read it. I can hardly tell where the sex scenes happen, let alone do I think children would be able to. Madame Bovary is another example, which I read for my senior French thesis, and yet I hardly knew where the sex happened in that book, either. I in fact had to read some Cliff's notes to even point out the spots where it happened. Tess of the d'Urbervilles falls in the same category, that even after I was told where to look to find the sex scenes, they were impossible. I remember reading the introduction before I read the book (almost always a bad idea, but in fact absolutely necessary for reading this book, or else I would have missed the primary theme entirely), and it explained what was going to happen to Tess. Either I'm oblivious, or Thomas Hardy hides all of the sex very well.

Now, I realize that not all of these books have been banned. But they're books that stand out in my mind as possibly "offend[ing] the public morals" (the reason cited for originally banning Madame Bovary in France). I realize now that I'm in fact making the same judgments about Lolita that many censors often make about books they challenge: I, like they, have never read it. I've read the other three, and they're all definitely offensive (if you can get beyond the flowery language of the past to actually find where it's offensive). But as I said, children won't be able to flesh out those hidden nuances. It reminds me of when I read Gulliver's Travels. It was nothing but a fun read about an adventure a guy goes on. It had nothing to do with satire; in fact, I didn't even know what the word meant!

So, I suppose I should pull this all back in. I'm surprised at how much I'm actually leery of letting children read some of these books, but I also would have been offended as a child if there had been a book I wasn't allowed to read. Even now, the fact that a book is "off-limits" makes me want to read it even more. When the group presenting mentioned that book sales rise after a book is banned made me think of this very reason: people want to feel like they're doing something "rebellious", and this is an easy way to do that.