Banned Book Week

I tend to read a lot of banned books.  They're usually worth reading, and nothing like Banned Book Week gets me motivated to actually read the ones that have been sitting on my To-Read list for ages.  While these other posts aren't necessarily of the Banned Book Week variety, I thought they might be an enjoyable look back at some older posts and maybe make you aware of some titles you didn't realize were banned or challenged.  I might not catch all of them since people will ban some pretty tame stuff, but I'll peg the obvious ones for you.  In alphabetical order by title, for your convenience.

Enjoy your freedom to read!

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (by guest blogger, Dan Walker.)
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (by guest blogger, Dan Walker.)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (posts by myself and guest blogger, Dan Walker.)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (by guest blogger, Dan Walker.)

On another note, I've decided to take a bit of a break from writing blog posts, so if you see a slew of guest posts in the next couple of days that's why.  If you're interested in being a guest blogger, please contact me at acampb8@kent.edu or check my contact page.

Day 125: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. ISBN: 9780141310886.

It takes a page and a half before our narrator, Melinda, gives us a rundown of all the clans, as she calls them, that students at her high school separate into.  In my time, we called them cliques, and my high school didn't have quite as colorful a selection.  I labelled my peers as I saw them: Jocks, Nerds, Preps, Goths, Burnouts, Shy Girls, Artists, and all the black kids.  I, of course, didn't fit in with any group.

The Preps liked me because I did their homework, but I was poor and couldn't take extra classes at the university in summer. The Jocks picked on everyone. Most of the rest were okay by me, but I didn't fit their style. Nerds came closest to being 'my people', because I wore glasses and got good grades, but even then, I don't think I had the same motivations a lot of them did. Plus, nerds in large packs are
really annoying.*

Thanks to a chance encounter halfway through tenth grade, I fell in with a group of about thirteen kids, from all grades, and found my circle of friends. I like to think we were far more tightly-knit than the other social groups. Rather than letting ourselves be outcast by them, we wore our lack of fitting in like a badge, proud of not being part of the herd. We sat around before and after school, playing role-playing games. We dreamed big stories about fantastic characters. We laughed at the outside world.

We called ourselves the Fire Hazards; funny story, that. One of our first hangouts was in front of the second-floor elevator, which was only accessible by faculty. We would group together there before class and do what we did. One day, the principal came by and told us we had to find somewhere else to sit, because we were being fire hazards by blocking the elevator. (Of course, you're not supposed to use elevators during a fire, right?) Like our outcast status, we took the designation and owned it, moving into the cafeteria.

I was kind of amazed in the book by the character Heather, who was trying desperately to fit in with one particular clan, the Marthas. I don't remember that sort of social competition in my school, but then again, I didn't care about it. I mean, yeah, fitting in would have been nice sometimes, but I would definitely be a different person now. I still carry a lot of high school with me; sometimes I wonder if I still haven't left it behind. So many of my best memories are from school; many of my attitudes were formed from things that happened in high school, too. But then, who I am was irrevocably shaped by everything that happened to me during my public school days, and my identity is forever tied to those Fire Hazards I used to call friends. Maybe I'll never be able to give it up; maybe I shouldn't. Who knows?


Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.

*Post originally written July 11, 2010 so the regular author could get caught up on her own reading/writing.

Day 158: Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. ISBN: 9780141310886.

One of the ways Melinda copes with her difficult social and emotional situation is by self-harming.  I don't think many people know this, but I practiced self-harm through a large portion of my teenage years.  I was probably about 14 when it started, and I didn't stop until I was about 17 or 18.  I still self-harm on particularly stressful occasions, but not as regularly as I used to.  In fact, I can't recall the last time I did it, but the urge is still there.

I don't know why other people do it, but I'll tell you why I did.  I was invisible.  I was invisible to everyone except for the person I wanted most to be invisible to.  My brother was physically abusive to me and I was constantly terrified that it would turn into sexual abuse.  His behavior was erratic and he would get angry for what seemed like no reason.  He was on drugs and his friends were verbally abusive to me and sometimes inappropriate around me and my friends.

Mostly I think I was internalizing the abuse.  It was a way of having some control over the pain and the fear I knew I would be facing again, but didn't know when to expect.  I never cut very deeply, they were surface wounds and always on my forearm, but I felt that I deserved it and that it's what people wanted for me because no one was stopping what else was going on.  On particularly bad days I would scream at my mother after being hit or tormented by my brother and then lock myself in my room and bang my head against the wall until I felt like vomiting from the headache and the crying.  It had the added benefit of upsetting my mother as much as it upset me.  I was trying to speak, but no one was listening, so I stopped talking.

It was an extreme relief when my mother installed outside locks on our bedroom doors.  There had been times where I had to sit against the door because my brother would pop the other lock with a screw driver so he could come in and hit me.  There are days when I really don't know how I survived those years, because I desperately, desperately wanted to die, but just didn't know how to go through with it.

This is a pretty good review, if somewhat on the short and scanty side.  This has been discussed before by guest blogger Dan Walker.  Read his post here.

Day 157: Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. ISBN: 9780141310886.

In some ways I like reading these books because it gives me a chance to talk about high school.  High school was a pretty terrible experience for me, except for the one year I was in an academic magnet program.  And on the first page of Speak, Melinda gives us a list of lies they tell you in high school.  Number ten is "These will be the years you look back on fondly."

I have yet to meet anyone whose high school experience could be remembered fondly, unless that fondness is in knowing that it's over.  High school is almost like being ripped out of the womb all over again.  You have to face the world and all of its obligations and horrors, but very little of the freedoms.  Social relationships take such dramatic changes that I don't think anyone left high school without a great deal of dysfunction regarding social interactions.  It's probably why some people don't get over it, and most of us do seem to base our future relationships on the way we interacted with people in high school.

Luckily for me I had a second awakening in college and was able to escape my high school socialization.  Like Melinda, I was pretty much outcast, not fitting in to any group, and not really having any true friends.  I was not shunned, but neither was I particularly welcome to participate anywhere.  My experience on the whole was very lonely, I spent most of my lunch breaks doing homework.

It took me about two years to break out of my shell in college and learn to socialize in a more healthy manner.  I wasn't even particularly excited about college when I first entered, although I should have been.  High school was such a soul crushing experience that I half expected college to be the same.  And in some ways it was, which made it even more difficult for me to change my attitude.  But I did love my classes, and once I got involved in Dialogia and Fat Group I was able to connect with people in different ways.  I didn't leave Antioch with that group of good friends that everyone else seems to have left with, but there are people that I love and admire, who I think appreciate who I am as a person, and that's far more than I can say about the people I left behind in high school.

This is a pretty good review, if somewhat on the short and scanty side.  This has been discussed before by guest blogger Dan Walker.  Read his post here.