What We Are Doing to Libraries
If you want your heart broken–or if your heart is made of stronger stuff than mine–read this piece from the Washington Post, “The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.”
Read MoreTania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.
A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.
Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave.
Georgette Heyer and The Grand Sophy
So Georgette Heyer, it seems, is no longer an antisemite.
Of course that’s ridiculous. Georgette Heyer is exactly as antisemitic as she ever was–at least, her books are.
In The Grand Sophy (which happens to be the only Heyer book I’ve read; it was enjoyable) the moneylender is no longer swarthy, greasy, and named Goldhanger. He’s now just named Grimpstone. He still has an ingratiating leer, for whatever that’s worth.
I have mixed feelings about this. If these changes, made with the permission of her estate, mean that a new reader can float through the book without getting smacked in the face by a truly ugly, damaging, and hurtful stereotype, that seems to be a net good for society.
And yet….
When Mary Bly, a novelist and scholar, wrote an introduction to the book explaining the changes and why they’d been made, the publisher balked. Bly withdrew from the project, along with her introduction. That does bother me.
To make the changes–maybe.
To refuse to discuss or acknowledge the changes–a problem.
We gain something when hurtful stereotypes are removed. We lose something when we refuse to–or are not allowed to–acknowledge that Georgette Heyer might have been a talented writer who portrayed smart, independent women (for the time period and genre in which she wrote) and a bigot at the same time.
We lose the ability to think about books and writers and ourselves with nuance. Maybe we begin to think that the only people who harbor bias are villains as one-dimensional as Goldhanger/Grimpstone–not lively writers of light fiction who gave a lot of pleasure to the world. Not people we admire. Not people who might look a bit like us.
Read MoreBanned Books Week
Alyssa Roseberg and Greg Sargent have an excellent piece in the Washington Post called “It’s Banned Books Week. Here’s How To Fight for Libraries.”
Read it.
One huge takeaway–those who want books banned are a vocal but tiny minority. Sixty percent of all book challenges in the US in 2020-2021 were filed by 11 people.
Eleven people. Fewer than a dozen. Eleven people in a country of 335 million deciding who should can have access to Stamped and George and Genderqueer and The Hill We Climb and It’s Perfectly Normal. Eleven people who think they get to decide not what they are going to read, but what we all should get to read.
Folks, that is not majority rule. That is not democracy. That is not freedom of speech, knowledge, or information.
That is not right.
Read MoreLibrarians Don’t Belong In Jail
This is the kind of books that could have educators fined or jailed if LD 123 becomes law in Maine.
I’m from Portland, Maine. If you’re also a Mainer, please call your state representative and speak out against a bill, LD 123, which could leave school librarians open to $5000 fines and five years in jail for making books accessible to kids.
I hate the idea of targeting librarians and educators who are just trying to teach, inspire, and help kids. And I also hate the fact that this bill’s language is so vague that no one will be able to figure out what material violates it. Playboy? It’s Perfectly Normal? Any James Bond novel? GenderQueer? Speak? Julie of the Wolves? Who knows?
And that’s deliberate, of course. People who propose bills like these want every educator on edge all the time, worried about crippling fines and jail time instead of doing their jobs.
It’s vicious. It’s vile. Please push back.
Here’s an easy way to do just that.
Read MoreSarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews