Banned Book Week by Kim Brown

This past week, I was walking down the street of the town where I live with my two-year-old granddaughter, who had recently had a meltdown at the Mexican restaurant on the corner. The village of Glen Ellyn reminds me of a real-life version of Disney World’s Main Street. It’s perfect for taking a walk with a cranky two-year-old. 

As we walked along Main Street, we named the various items in the store windows, like the bikes in the bicycle shop and the gnomes and dragons in the gnome colony display. I don’t quite understand the point of that particular store, but that’s for another day. 

When we got to the yarn store, I was pleased to see a display about the importance of voting. I explained to my granddaughter how much I loved yarn but didn’t need to buy anymore. She didn’t seem to care much about yarn or my yarn obsession. She was much more interested in the books on display at the bookstore next door, The Bookstore of Glen Ellyn. Unfortunately, the store was closed, so we stood at the side window talking about the various children’s books. 

“Let’s go see what books they might have for Mimi,” I said as I prompted her to walk around to the front of the store. 

The entire front window was dedicated to Banned Book Week, September 22nd through 28th. As I scanned the titles in the window, it felt very different from the displays I had seen in bookstores over the years. Back then, book banning felt like some problem of the past. But Banned Book Week has been around for over forty years. It was established in 1982 to combat a surge in the number of challenges to books in bookstores, libraries, and schools and to draw attention to the harm of censorship.  

Standing in front of the bookstore with my granddaughter, I was shocked at the variety of books banned at one time or another in our country. And now it’s happening far more often and is a real threat to our future. According to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom, there are 1,247 demands to censor library books and resources, a 65% increase since 2022—the highest in twenty years of tracking.

I decided to dive deeper into the list of banned books. I wanted to identify at least five books that changed my life and write about them. But as I perused the list, I realized it wasn’t that simple. The list not only included books that changed my life. There were books I read for pure enjoyment. Books that expanded the way I thought about myself and the world. Books that were fundamental to my education and ability to think critically. There were at least 70 books on the list that had profoundly affected me, and many I would have never read had they not been assigned to me in a class. 

As a middle school student, I hated reading Of Mice and Men, yet the story has always stuck with me. I felt ‘in the know’ when I observed the archetype of Lennie and George frequently seen in cartoons. The book’s central theme, inspired by Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse,’ is so deeply etched in my brain that I still find myself saying the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry when things don’t work out as planned. I realize the themes in the book of violence against women, racism, and the harsh realities of life during the Great Depression are troubling. Still, the story provides a platform to discuss these complex social issues and the human condition. There is also an underlying lesson of compassion. 

In my writing life, I have written many times about how Judy Blume’s  Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret was the first time I experienced the comfort and validation of seeing myself in a character. It made me want to become a writer. I’ve also written about how reading THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK prompted me to start a diary, a practice I continue to this day, though I call it by a different name. It taught me to see writing as a safe place to express myself. I was devastated when I realized that Anne had been captured and subsequently died in a concentration camp. I cherish how she shared her heart and insight on those pages. My love for her put a human face on the horrors of the Holocaust. 

I read The Awakening for the first time in high school and was deeply impacted by the ending.  I grappled with how Edna’s limited choices and need to be her own person led her to walk into the sea. When I reread it as an adult, it seemed to speak to the perceptual struggle of women to balance their roles and responsibilities with a need for self-actualization. The novel became a major cornerstone of my book, Cora’s Kitchen.

On two separate occasions, my oldest son, a high school sophomore, came home excited for me to read My Sister’s Keeper and The Handmaid’s Tale. He generally preferred comic books and graphic novels or watching television. I could not resist his recommendation and read the books immediately. After reading them, we discussed the social issues addressed in both books. We continued these types of discussions for the rest of his life.  

I could go on and on about how each banned book I have read affected my life. However, the critical thing to note is that having access to them nurtured a love of reading that has empowered me and enabled me to see beyond my experience, creating a curiosity about the world and compassion for people. Censorship threatens empowerment by limiting exposure to different perspectives and new ideas. It creates myopic thinking and a lack of empathy for one another.  That is why it is so important that we join the entire book community in expressing our concern about censorship and celebrating intellectual freedom and free expression. Check out The Banned Book website for ways to get involved with the  Let Freedom Read Day.  Together, we can defend books from censorship and stand up for librarians, educators, authors, booksellers, and publishers who make them available.

KIMBERLY GARRETT BROWN is Publisher and Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press, a literary press dedicated to publishing women writers. Her best-selling debut novel, Cora’s Kitchen, won the 2022 Story Circle Network Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction and the 2022 Bronze Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for multicultural fiction. Her work has appeared in Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems and Personal Narratives, The Feminine Collective, Compass Literary Magazine, Today’s Chicago Woman, Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Goddard College. She currently lives in Glen Ellyn, IL.