When my daughter was in 9th grade, we started, with one of her teachers, a mother-daughter book club. With five other girls and their Moms, we met every month to discuss a book chosen by a mother-daughter pair. We read many books that were outside of my regular lists, like White Oleander by Janet Fitch, which the girls loved and most of the Moms found way too disturbing. We read The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon, the first book that I remember reading featuring an autistic person as the main character. We read some Jane Austen and, of course, Jane Eyre, which I had read before and have read a couple of times since. I remember some great fantasy fare, like the wonderful dragons and wizards in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea world.
I read things that I otherwise would not have read, or even heard of, because they were of interest to someone else. I could attempt to understand unfathomable concepts by listening to how they made sense to the girls and their Moms. We talked about right and wrong, struggled with difficult social realities related to difference and with what we all have in common as humans, and had a lot of fun and laughs, too. The book club continued for four years until the girls graduated; our time together is a lasting positive memory of my daughter’s high school years, for her and for me.
I started reflecting on that book club as I read this New York Times article a few days ago, “Attempts to Ban Books Doubled in 2022” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/books/book-ban-2022.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20230326&instance_id=88682&nl=the-morning®i_id=133155851&segment_id=128789&te=1&user_id=28fcea388e0552900a93ea0857b4b7ee). Many of the banned books are about gender identity, sexual orientation, race relations, and other current issues of social relationships and difference. Keeping young people from reading books on these topics seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. Access to a full array of reading material at school and public libraries is, to me, one of the most valuable freedoms of an open democracy, and critical to the growth and development of young minds.
What we need is more reading and more conversations and more grown-ups involved with young people as they tackle new ideas and concepts and ways of seeing the world. We need more school librarians and counselors and parent volunteers to meet with students and talk about what they are reading, what it means to them, and how it matters in their lives. We need to encourage students to read about topics that weren’t even talked about when we were in school. How do we make progress in a society if young people are limited to the things that made sense to us when we were young and trying to understand the world 20 or 30 or 40 years ago? Everything from new scientific understandings of the universe to insights about what kinds of human relationships are viable need to be thought about, processed, and discussed among students, hopefully with the guidance and authentic participation of caring adults. (When my son was in college, we read, together, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene, about string theory. Only one of us understood the book, but I tried. The concepts were mostly over my head but what a lovely experience to learn with and from my son.)
Instead of limiting the reading material of young people, let’s all read it together. For us, the grown-ups, let’s open ourselves to the idea that maybe we don’t understand everything and that the things that were real for us when we were in school are no longer relevant or at least have changed in many aspects. Our children will benefit from our openness and we will likely learn as much as they will in the process.