Recently, a library in Virginia celebrated the freedom to read in a pretty cool way:
It's so easy to think of the US as being full of close-minded book-banning types, until you take a look at the history of banned literature in Australia. This country banned Gore Vidal's
The City and The Pillar until 1967, a book US citizens had had access to since 1948.
Both
Ulysses and
Lady Chatterley's Lover were banned in Australia, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies claiming that if he didn't want his wife reading the latter, then no one should be reading it. Personally, I think it was a bit of an insult to his wife's imagination to assume she could never get the idea of taking a lover on her own.
No Bob, it must be all those dirty books she's been reading.
Generally, banning books seems like a complete waste of time. Why would anyone ban
Ulysses? The raciness of this novel is completely lost on the 95% of readers who never make it past page 17.
But it's important to pay attention to censorship, particularly if you could easily imagine it isn't still going on. I'd like to know just what the government doesn't want me to be reading. I'm not necessarily going to immediately read it online out of principle, but it seems important to recognise that this process is ongoing.
It would be cool to have a special black cabinet with a lock and key in which you kept history's most banned books.
Alice in Wonderland,
The Satanic Verses,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
Peter Rabbit,
The Bible and
The Koran would snuggle in there together like little fiction ideabombs, ready to detonate in your brain. Excitement!
The banning of things seems a far more theoretical exercise since the advent of the internet anyway. You can get your hands on what you please nowadays, no more passing around a frayed copy of
The Tropic of Cancer in the locker room.
The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a euthanasia guide still banned in Australia is available as a digital download from their website. If you want to build a bomb, you'd head to the internet, not to the library.
Other than books which supposedly incite terrorists to action, there's no list online of the most challenged books in Australia. The excellent American Library Association publishes its
own list. The number one most offensive book in America today is apparently a picture book about two male penguins who hatch an egg together.
And it's a true story! But I guess some would-be censors can't handle the truth.
Thanks to
Boing Boing, the
library in question,
The Book Show and
two little gay penguins who had a dream.
