LREI’s Annual Book Week

February 17, 2022

Dear LREI Families,

As we head towards LREI’s annual Book Week (the week of February 28, more info coming in your PA email) which along with the Book Fair and the Literary Evening are among the great LREI traditions, maybe the Book Week related activity that I most cherish is walking into one of the four libraries that I frequent (two at LREI, the NYPL, and the Brooklyn Public Library) and choosing my next book. What worlds will I find inside? What new friends or opponents await?  What will I learn about myself? I read on a friend’s social media feed something that I am told is an oft posted quote by a librarian, “A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone.” I suggest a revision as I don’t think offense should be the goal. A truly great library has something in it to challenge everyone, is more like it. Maybe add support, amuse, entertain, befriend, and captivate. That is, in libraries where the collection isn’t riddled with holes where the banned books used to sit.

LREI’s librarians have always observed September’s “Banned Books Week,” using it as a way to shine a light on the issue of readers challenging books and not the other way around. We are seeing what seems to be an increase in the number of books that are challenged and banned by schools and libraries, or at least in the volume of the calls to ban and restrict, and it seems important to add this lens to our upcoming celebration of literature.

If the issue is what happens when a book challenges the boundaries of what a person or community sees as safe, appropriate, or acceptable, isn’t that the point!  These books allow us to learn about, to experience, lives that we are not leading, may never lead, or that we are leading alone, without comrades, and that we are struggling to understand. These books, these characters, these places and worlds become our connection and, sometimes, our lifeline.

I often wonder if, paradoxically, those who lead these efforts to ban a book would be doing so if they had read this very same book when they were younger. Would those who, two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, succeeded in having Maus, by Art Spiegelman, be banned, be more focused on nude cartoon animals and “bad language” than on the death of millions if they had learned about the Holocaust by reading Maus when they were in school? I don’t think so. (Missed this episode?  Here is an opinionated review of what happened.) I must point out the obvious, that it is not a surprise that so many books that are challenged and/or banned have the experiences of marginalized communities at their core. How best to keep the marginalized in the margins? Don’t allow anyone to learn to care about them.

As parents, we have the opportunity to guide our children’s book choices, especially when they are younger and doable, though harder, as our children mature. If our values are central to our family, if they are part of our daily lives and choices, we can also help them be present in media choices, without banishing anything that challenges them. Don’t these challenges emphasize the importance of our beliefs and the ways in which we structure our lives around them? How can we prepare our children for the wider world if they don’t experience it? At some point, we won’t be with our kids to explain the ideas that challenge them, to help them to learn to disagree. This is a skill that they must practice. We also know that many, many people find their communities, their people, in books and that this can literally be a lifesaver. We must trust our children to reflect on our family’s values as they encounter those that books bring into their orbits.

LREI prides itself on shrinking the distance between the schoolhouse and the “real world.” We do this in a variety of ways, using a variety of tools. Among our greatest tools in this pursuit are books. A well crafted book allows the reader to experience a life they may never lead. In bridging this gap, we are able to reflect on our own lives and exercise our humanity. Again, thinking as a parent, I am so grateful when school experiences, when reading experiences, share with my children a point of view, a window into the lives of others, a window into their own lives, that I have not, that I can not, or even that I may choose not to share.

In this one hundredth year of Elisabeth Irwin’s experiment, if we have learned anything, it is that school is exactly the place to experience the challenges that we find in books; truly good, truly transformative, truly moving books. With our student co-conspirators, with our trusted teachers and guides, with the promise of safety and growth that those who care for us provide, bring on the challenge, bring on the opportunity to find the selves we have yet to meet or understand, bring on the idea or action that we find confusing, the past or future that challenges and frightens, bring on the sadness and the joy, we will survive them, we can learn from them. And, truly, if we don’t learn how to do so now, in school, in what should rival home for safety, then we never will. This, the absence of these experiences, more than a “bad word,” more than sex and violence, more than a people we have been taught to fear, this is the biggest threat that we will ever experience, the drive towards imagined safety through true ignorance.

During the coming long weekend, I encourage you to read, to read with your children and loved ones, and especially to read banned books with your children and loved ones. You can find many lists of banned books online. You can start here at Banned Books Week.org. Read the views of authors on the perils of banning books and of those who found meaning in books that were quite personally challenging.

Happy reading,