So Many Books ...

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. – Frederick Douglass

  

  When I was a very little girl, I had my own set of red-bound story books. My father sat me on his lap at night and read them to me. The opening page was smudged where my fingers traced the footprints leading us into fairy tales, tall tales, and wondrous adventures.

       The day I learned to read a book for myself, I ran all the way home, shouting the news to my waiting mom. "Look, Jane, look. See Spot run."

    I got my first library card in Asheboro, North Carolina. Mom took us to the library every week, and I read their entire collection of biographies for children. The little books were bound in blue, and each opened with a silhouette of the person about whom the biography was written. I know many people who happily remember reading those little blue books.

    When I was in junior high school, I found a racy book at a relative's house that seemed dangerous and exciting to read. I never told anyone. It did not cause me to become pregnant or take up drugs.

    In high school, I read To Kill a Mockingbird and felt ashamed. I read The Razor's Edge, recommended to me by a favorite teacher. It inspired the notion of a personal spiritual quest, and changed my life. My brother, my niece, and I have read it many times and talk about it to this day.

    In college I read late into the night. I loved English Lit. and hated geology. I read books that made me angry and books that made me cry. I trudged my way through books that seemed like a waste of time, but increased in value over the years. I read about people and places that were different from me. I experienced more of the world than my then circumscribed life allowed, and I grew as a person. 

    I am happy to say that I still have a library card, and I have read countless books since college. Books still make me angry and make me cry. They make me feel proud and despairing. I still learn from what I read, and I am capable of calling something "inspired" or "bullshit", as I see fit. 

    Books are my life companions. I would be so much less as a person without them. Whether they take up a well-thumbed residence on my bedside table or are hurried off to Goodwill barely touched, it is my choice, and I like making that choice for myself. I might get into heated discussions about books, but I don't want to prevent you from reading any sort of trifling, trashy book with which you choose to waste your time. 

    I have recently been reading the heartbreaking news that there is a movement throughout our country to remove long lists of books, deemed by some few people to be offensive, not only from school libraries, but from PUBLIC libraries. Law suits have even been attempted against retail vendors to control what can be sold. Librarians have had their lives threatened by bullies and thugs masquerading as concerned citizens. 

    This is no less than an attempt to control what we can read and what we can know and think about.

    Do you imagine that I will sit idly by and allow you to take my books away from me? Over my dead body.