Monthly Archives: September 2009

According to One Of My Favorite People, Neil Gaiman, this week is the ALA’s Banned Books Week.  This is the week where the American Library Association speaks out against censorship in libraries and schools and encourages readers to pick up and read one of the frequently banned books.

The ALA has adopted Ellen Hopkins’s wonderful anti-censorship poem as its manifesto:

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,
innocents ripe for corruption
by perversion or sorcery on the page.
But sticks and stones do break
bones, and ignorance is no armor.
You do not speak for me,
and will not deny my kids magic
in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,
the red, white and blue corroded
by terrorists, socialists, the sexually
confused. But we are a vast quilt
of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered
identities. You cannot speak for those
whose ancestors braved
different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,
the living word eroded by Muhammed
and Darwin and Magdalene.
But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven
and earth designed intelligence.
Surely you dare not speak
for the father, who opens
his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.

So, in favor of my favorite constitutional amendment, and in support of Banned books week, I thought I’d offer up a list of my favorite commonly banned books.  I’d like to encourage all of you to pick up one of these to read.  They’re all wonderful, and they make you do that thing that book banning advocates most fear: Think.

• 1984 by George Orwell: The ultimate argument against government censorship, information control, and surveillance, this is the portrait of a world where even a person’s thoughts can get him in trouble. Usually banned by governments who practice what the novel argues against.
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume: I am honestly of the opinion that this should be required reading for young teenage girls, for the very reasons it’s often censored. It deals frankly with the traumas of the onset of female puberty – like periods, self-image with a changing body, and boys. (Five Judy Blume’s books are on the list of most banned books – and I don’t know how I’d have managed to make it through my pre-teen years without them.)
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson: This book won the Newbery Medal in 1978, and is one of my favorite books from childhood.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway:  Hemingway is another frequent visitor to the banned books pile, largely due to language and violence, but his books are, across the board, some of the best American fiction ever written.
• Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling: Frequently banned, and rejected for a Presidential Medal during the Bush administration, because it contains, *gasp* Magic, Witches, and Wizards, these are some of my favorite novels, and something that can get kids to read a 600+ page book is never a bad thing.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: I’m a huge fan of Vonnegut. This book has been subject to censorship due to profanity, but it’s a wonderful read, and the best of Vonnegut’s books.
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle:  Another of those books which has both won the Newbery Medal and been banned from schools and libraries due to mentions of witches and crystal balls (which are not actual witches or crystal balls, but scientists and scientific instruments) and a challenge to religious beliefs. This is a wonderful sci-fi novel along the same lines as Dune, but geared toward pre-adolescent and adolescent audiences.

So go join the librarians and be subversive, pick up one of these banned books (or one of the many, many others) and enjoy a bit of forbidden entertainment and enlightenment.

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I’ve been a fan of Cassandra Clare since before she was a bestselling author.  I first came across her writing in the most humble of locations – a Harry Potter fanfiction community.  Her Draco Dormiens trilogy, a retelling of the Harry Potter series from Draco’s perspective, is one of those incredibly rare, amazing things you almost never find: Good, well-written, novel-length fanfiction that keeps the spirit of the original characters intact.

Unfortunately, Draco Dormiens is nearly impossible to find now, since a cease-and-desist order forced its removal from the internet.

I had heard, through that same fanfiction community, that she had been working on an original novel and had found a publisher.  Here was someone who had managed the fanficcer’s greatest dream – a book of her own on store shelves.

Knowing the quality of her writing, I was unsurprised to find out that it had made it to the NYT Bestselling list. I didn’t actually pick it up until after the third book, City of Glass, had come out, though, mostly due to my own failure to keep up with what was happening with them.

At first glance, I was a bit disappointed, as the books looked to be Twilight clones, and Twilight had read as badly written, Mary Sue filled, fanfiction.

The Mortal Instruments series might deal with the same general genre as Twilight, but it is that genre in the hands of a good writer. Believe me, as a long time lover of vampires, a good writer makes all the difference.  They aren’t the best or most original books I’ve ever read, the subject matter is clichè, especially at this point in time when the marketplace is absolutely flooded with vampire stories.

What sets these novels apart, not just from the other vampire stories glutting the marketplace now, but also from most adolescent and young adult fiction currently in publication, are the issues that Clare deals with in her books.  There are no weak women in this series – indeed, the women are generally the most strong-willed of the characters, whether for good or for ill. No matter what side of the fence the women sit on, they are almost uniformly strong, intelligent, and opinionated.

She writes, extremely frankly, about homosexuality.  One of the central characters is gay, and the world of the Nephilim (demon-hunters) that he must exist in is even more oppressive against homosexuality than our own.  There’s also an issue of incestuous attraction between the two main protagonists who, like Luke and Leia, find out that they are siblings only after their first kiss.  (Gays and incestuous thoughts in a YA novel, Clare, you are a brave one!)

Clare is not above making jokes about the tropes and clichès of the genre, either.  At a party filled with “Underworlders”, the heroine wonders about how there are only beautiful vampires, never any ugly ones.  She gives easter-eggs and tongue-in-cheek references to the geek community where she found her start, and with an insider’s sense of humor.  World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and Naruto mangas make appearances throughout the novels, bringing the world of the books more fully into this one.  These books are written by a geek for other geeks, but you wouldn’t have to be a geek to enjoy them.

Definitely a fun read – I made it through the first two books in the space of a week, and the third was only delayed because I was having trouble getting my hands on it.  I’m anxiously awaiting the fourth.  They are unashamedly pulp, and if you don’t get into vampires and werewolves and demons, you probably wouldn’t get into these, but if you can set aside your post-Twilight disgust for a moment or two, you can have a good bit of fun reading them.

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So apparently the Rapture was Tuesday, and we completely missed it. Ooops.

Also, the government was going to nuke Chicago, which…well, it appears Chicago is still there.

The reasoning behind this?  Tuesday was 9/22 – ripe for a sequel to 9/11.

Also: The Illinois Lottery drawing is on Tuesdays. (Er…how is this evidence that the city will get nuked, beginning the apocalypse?)

Um. Yeah. Okeydokey.  That’ll get filed away with “Vaccines make children autistic, so don’t get them vaccinated” (Because having your children die of measles is a much better option.)

Among other news, an experimental AIDS vaccine has been developed that reduces the risk of infection.  This is, of course, a wonderful breakthrough which shows that there is a possibility of an end to the disease.

Unfortunately, I have already heard people talking about how the vaccine is evil and will encourage people to have premarital sex – the same arguments given for the gardisil vaccine for HPV.  Somehow people seem easily able to forget the people who get STDs unknowingly from unfaithful spouses, or children who get them from their parents.  AIDS should be eradicated, and this is the first thing we’ve seen that gives some hope that it could even be possible.  A reduced chance isn’t an end, but it’s a chance.

<sarcasm>Plus, since everyone knows that AIDS was sent down from God as a punishment for deviant behavior, a vaccine will give gays a better chance to take over the world, because that’s really what they’re after!</sarcasm>

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I am an over-weight, fairly low-income person, and I am in favor of the fat tax being debated for empty-calorie, high-sugar and high-fat items such as sodas and junk food.

Before the modern era of quick and cheep fast food and junk food, obesity was a problem of the rich and wealthy, who never wanted for food and could eat to excess, whereas the poor were generally the underfed and malnourished.

That has changed, in America, at least.  The cheapest calories today are the least nutritious and most fattening and dangerous. Healthy food, particularly fresh produce, has a tendency to be both hard to obtain in some areas, and ridiculously expensive when it is available.  (For instance, I have switched to using extra lean ground turkey instead of beef in some recipes, but the turkey tends to run almost $2-3/pound more than the higher-fat ground beef.)

With everyone, including the poor, moving away from high-activity manual labor jobs, people are exercising less, or not at all. While things like walking and running remain free, access to weight-loss support systems and guided and supported exercise programs are increasingly expensive.  Good health is for the wealthy.

While any type of luxury tax (such as the taxes on alcohol and tobacco now) has a tendency to prey heavily on the poor, it would at least act as a discouraging factor by raising the prices on these items.  The money raised can then be put into nutrition education and establishing those support programs that, right now, the poor have little to no access to.

With support and assistance, and a little hand-holding, lack of motivation can be conquered. Making it more attractive and less expensive to buy healthy food items rather than junk food can only help.  The fat tax itself would only be one thing out of the many that would need to be implemented for it to succeed, but together they would lower the number of people with those diseases that are brought on due to unhealthy behaviors.

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Today is the 72nd anniversary of the Lord of the Rings, a book that, in a lot of ways, birthed a genre.

Many of the strongholds (and cliches) of modern fantasy literature found their beginnings in Tolkien’s masterpiece. Nearly every fantasy novel since then has been written in some attempt to replicate the emotions and adventure contained within those pages. The personalities and cultures of the common fantasy races were created by Tolkien with only the barest adherance to the myths that he drew them from.

It immediately set a standard so high that only very few were able to walk down Tolkien’s path afterwards with success. There are still, nearly three quarters of a century later, few worlds built as elaborate or real or alive as Middle Earth. This was a world of magic, certainly, but a world that people could believe in nonetheless, as full of differing peoples and cultures and languages as our own, and just as in our own, there are petty and minor political conflicts and squabbles due to clashes of those cultures.

This is not an easy book to read, either. At some points it drags, during the chapters of “begats” and explanations, where it leaves the action entirely.  And yet, even children manage to make their way through this epic, and some, like myself, have read and re-read the tale so many times that the books become dog-eared and ragged.

Is it an impossibly high standard to hold fantasy authors to, that they create worlds that, like Middle Earth, you can get lost in?  So much of fantasy literature today is just a shadow, an inexact and inferior copy of Lord of the Rings. It might have birthed a genre of literature, but in many ways it has also limited it over the years, making it difficult to actually be different and original, because the reader has been taught to expect certain things in their fantasy epics…

But as much as we might want the sensation of reading this book for the first time again and again….maybe it’s time to step out of the shadow of this book, wonderful as it is, and create some new worlds without a dependence on the old.

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