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Nobody but your parents has the right to tell you what books you can and can’t read.
How do you explain to someone else why a thing matters to you if it doesn’t matter to them? How can you put into words how a book slips inside of you and becomes a part of you so much that your life feels empty without it?
I was glad to have my own copy, but I couldn’t help thinking about that book that wasn’t on the library shelves anymore, and how I would never have known From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was my favorite book if I hadn’t found it there in the first place.
“Why do you guys care so much?” Danny asked. “Are these books really good or something?” “They have to be,” Rebecca told him. “Why else do you think they banned them?”
Good books shouldn’t be hidden away. They should be read by as many people as many times as possible.
Good books shouldn’t be hidden away. They should be read by as many people as many times as possible. But that wasn’t exactly true. It wasn’t just good books that shouldn’t be hidden away. It was all books.
I was lucky. My parents would buy me any book I wanted if I asked them to. But not everybody’s parents would do that. Not everybody’s parents could do that. That’s what libraries were for: to make sure that everybody had the same access to the same books everyone else did.
I stacked them by size, then stacked them alphabetically, then stacked them by books I’d read and books I hadn’t read. I loved the weight of them, the feel of them, especially the hardback books with the clear plastic coating that crinkled and crackled as you opened the book. Some of them were old—older even than I was. Some of them were brand new. And all of them had been banned.
It was a treasure trove, these stacks, and suddenly I had the idea that I was Smaug the dragon sitting on my piles of gold and jewels, and I would do anything to keep that hobbit and those dwarves from taking them back. How had I not seen books as treasure before? I loved books. I couldn’t imagine living without them. But I had never seen each book as such a valuable thing before. Even the books I wasn’t interested in reading were like gold. It didn’t matter what was inside them. One man’s junk was another man’s treasure, as my grandmother said. The same thing was true with books. One person’s
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“Look, the point is, once you ban one book, somebody, somewhere, can find a reason to ban every book,”
How was the woman who banned books from the library the same person who bought the little kids a new playground?
Danny leaned in to the microphone. “Oh, that book is full of dirty words. I looked all of them up.”
“Silly to you, maybe. All reasons are silly to someone else, and we think the challenges to the books already removed are silly. What makes one person’s reason any sillier than another person’s reason?”
Every book banned by the school board in this novel is the title of a book that has been challenged or banned in an American library at least once in the last thirty years.
