Banned Books Week
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
John Milton, Areopagitica
The ALA’s annual Banned Books Week commences today. 2005′s list of books challenged in public libraries and schools contains many of the old stand-bys for raising hackles–”The Catcher in the Rye”, “The Chocolate War”, “Forever”–for the usual old stand-by reasons–sex, language, “anti-family content” (whatever that is, it’s what got the “Captain Underpants” series in trouble…). And books aren’t just challenged with polite written requests to have a book removed; folks continue to set fire to books, as if destroying the physical manifestation of an idea could destroy the idea itself.
Much as I love books, though, I’m confident that the ideas they carry are stronger than their pages. Books are powerful things, and readers are tough, toughened by facing challenging ideas head-on rather than tossing the uncomfortable and the intemperate into bonfires.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
John Milton, Areopagitica
