On a quick side note, I’m watching old Veronica Mars and Logan just mentioned completing Freshmen Comp in the list of classes he’s completing and DOESN’T HATE!!! YAY
On to the focus, reading and the complexities of reading. I’m working with a graduate student who has discussed and described literature and writing as always connected to social justice. I feel like Banned Books week is such an obvious connection between reading, writing, and social justice causes.
So obvious, in fact, that it’s overlooked, not even considered.
Books are banned for a reason – often the content introduces or facilitates conversations parents and schools find questionable for the youth the books are intended for. While looking through a list, I saw All American Boys made the list. This selection for our One Book One Campus last year is an amazing story. It introduces readers to a police beating, and the community fall-out of that beating. This story resonated with so many students. It also made other students incredibly uncomfortable, raising issues and ideas they’ve never experienced.
In other words, it did exactly what a book should do – it made students feel and react. It exposed students to ideas and stories, characters to help humanize a complicated idea.
Reading exposes readers to issues and ideas that can help them recognize injustices, that can help them empathize with different experiences, that can expose them to lived experiences they otherwise wouldn’t experience.
While I love and revel in the number of banned books I’ve read – because banned books are dangerous!!!!! – this year I want to reconnect reading and writing and banned books to the power of literature, the power of books. Embrace something new – read a book :).
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