Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Censorship!

While there are, of course, many, many types of readers in the world, the ones whom I am concerned with today divide into two camps: those who like scary books, and those who won't touch them.
Child No. 2 finds the plot stress of All of a Kind Family—will the children eat the corned beef that wasn't meant for them?!—almost beyond bearing, and will writhe in an agony of terror: "It's not their corned beef and they're eating it! Oh, tell me what's going to happen! Tell me what's going to happen! Oh, stop reading, I can't, I can't!"
Child No. 1 will happily read through the twists and turns of any number of monster, dragon, and magic books, some of which get really scary: Inkheart, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and so on.
I myself am now rereading 'Salem's Lot, which is probably one of the scariest books I've ever read. Reading it, for me, is terrifying but also in some ways a tonic: the great fear (and do understand that it's not that they don't scare me, I am terrified, but at least it takes my mind off other things) is transporting. It takes me away from other more uncomfortably real, worries. But, as so often happens, Child No. 1 espied my book.
Now, we have made some decisions at our house. One was that Child No. 1 was to be allowed free reign over the books in the house.
All of them.
I came to this, following an interesting discussion with the author Charles Slack, who told me that one of the joys and motivations for his writing life was his sense of his parents' bookshelves as this place of wonder and possibility, his own private place to discover. I worried, though, that Child No. 1, an extremely early and avid reader, would read things that her mind, while very sharp, could not quite process. But talking to others, and thinking it through, I came to believe that whatever she couldn't quite process would just sort of float away, unprocessed, filed under: to be understood later.
But when I saw Child No. 1 looking interestedly at the back cover of 'Salem's Lot, I just said NO.
No, that book is way too scary. No, you may not read it. No, you will not be able to just scoot past the things that you don't understand, because you will understand them all and THEY WILL TERRIFY YOU.
I explained this in as low-key and rational a way as I could. But I know that, however much I believe that children should have a world of possibility open to them, that books themselves cannot do any real harm, I am going to keep a very close watch on that book. And when I finish it, it is leaving the house.
This is censorship, isn't it? But this book scared me so much when I read it at 15, that I slept with the covers pulled high around my neck for...well, let's just say for a long time. I'm trying for benevolent censorship. But is there such a thing? What do you think?

What they're reading now
Child No. 1: Heir Apparent
Child No. 2: These Happy Golden Years

2 comments:

  1. Censor! As someone from the won't-read-scary-books camp, I think you do have to worry about what could be too much for a young child. I read The Exorcist when I was in my early teens, and it scared me so much, I prayed for time to go back to before I had read it so I could undo the horror.

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  2. My husband and I have vowed to have the same "you can read anything you want" commitment to reading that we felt we had.

    Of course, looking back, I can't BELIEVE someone didn't stop me from reading Flowers in the Attic by V C Andrews at the tender age of (gulp) 12.

    I had seen my teacher reading it during silent reading time and thought to look it up the next time I was at the library. And since my mom had signed the card saying I could take out ANYTHING....well, they had to let me check it out.

    But as uncomfortable as I am with that memory...I have to say that when I encountered stuff I wasn't ready for (Stephen King falls into that, btw) I put the book away.

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