Banned Picture Books

“Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.” 
― James Howe

Did you know that one of the most frequently challenged books of the last decade, according to the ALA, is in fact a picture book?

Despite the fact that it is based on a true story of two male penguins raising a baby penguin at the Central Park Zoo, And Tango Makes Three is often challenged due to its "mature themes", "unnatural depictions of nature" and "unsuitability for children".

A few others that have been frequently challenged or banned include....

Any surprises on this list? Are you surprised (as I was, when I first became involved with Banned Books Week) that people can be so vehemently against a picture book that they devote a significant amount of time and energy into attempting to ban it? 

Banned Books Week

“A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.” 
― Ellen Hopkins

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week. For those of you unfamiliar with the bookish tradition, it's a week to celebrate the freedom to read whatever you choose. Unfortunately, the vast majority of banned books are those written for children, which is what makes raising awareness such an important issue.

Censorship and parenting can become a tangled web, and everyone certainly has an opinion. It takes very little to spark "parenting wars", since having someone question your parenting decisions often cuts to the heart of many parents' own fears and insecurities.

While every individual certainly has the right to parent how he or she sees fit, the fact that the same books keep popping up on Banned Book Lists year after year, never fails, both as a parent and as a person, to make me upset. While we all have different methods and different values, I'm confident in saying that, as parents, what we truly want is for our children to grow into thoughtful, engaged adults who can successfully navigate the world without our help. In order to do so, they need to be able to make their own mistakes, form their own opinions, and experience what the world has to offer, both positive and negative. Cutting them off from literature that highlights the (admittedly sometimes upsetting) true breadth of human experience just seems counterintuitive.

But Banned Books Week is about more than something as limited as parental condemnation - it's about revolting against a system that believes it has the right to limit a person's literary choices. Because even if you believe that parents have the right to decide what their children do and don't read (an interesting post for another day, I'm sure!), no institution should be able to make that decision for them. The fact that books can be banned for reasons such as "offensive language" (according to whom?!) or "homosexuality" (seriously?!) is not only upsetting, it's criminal.

So in honour of Banned Books Week, I'd love to share a few of my favourites, and to hear about those you are reading. Do you make a point to read something that is frequently challenged during this week? Will you share that tradition with your kids? I'd love to know :)

Personal Favourites:

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This book is painful and rewarding, raw and absolutely real. I can't wait until J and Newt are old enough to appreciate it. I also love following Alexie on twitter!

The Giver. I've been in love with this book since I read it in elementary school. It was my first foray into the now-ubiquitous dystopian genre, and it has firmly ensconced itself amongst my all-time favourites.

Looking for Alaska. I know The Fault in Our Stars gets the most attention, but this is my favourite of John Green's novels.

His Dark Materials. These are the novels that I will recommend to anyone. I recommend them to pre-teens (the protagonist is 12 years old), to teenagers, to adults. I recommend them to people who love fantasy and people who aren't quite sure. I can confidently say that they will always be in my Top Ten Favourites of all time, and I make sure to read them every few years.

How about you, lovely readers?


   

Journaling as a Busy Mama

Keeping a journal has been something I've had trouble with my entire life. Buying journals has been (a little too) easy, and I always begin filling them out with the best intentions, but a couple of weeks in I just...forget. I get busy, I skip a night, or I make the mistake of reading back through the pages too soon (embarrassing!). It's unfortunate, because I'm sure that it would be fun to go back and read through them in a decade or two.

When I was pregnant with J, my good friend Leanne (who lovingly feeds my notebook addiction), gifted me with the ideal journal for busy mamas:

What to Read: The First Year

“More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.” 

― Sonya Hartnett

As someone who reads a lot, I thought it would be easy to pick out books for my babies. After all, I spent more time browsing the shelves at Chapters than I did almost anywhere else, and I was known to wander over to the baby section every now and then. Not only that, but I could remember how much I loved being read to, and had a list of favourites that I couldn't wait to share with my child.

I should have known that my kids would be as stubborn as their mother, and would want to pick their own favourites. :) That, compounded with the fact that the books I could remember reading weren't exactly age-appropriate for an infant, meant that I had some learning to do.

Luckily, J was an excellent teacher, and we discovered a new range of books together. Hopefully our fumblings through the world of early-reading can be of some use to you when asking yourself What should I read through my baby's first year?

Why I Want my Kids to be Readers

“In an age that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, when people can be transformed into non-persons, and where a great deal of our adult art seems to diminish our lives rather than add to them, children's literature insists on the values of humanity and humaneness.” 

― Lloyd Alexander

I just finished a book. I've been reading it for a few days (something that was unfathomable in my life before kids, when it took 4-6 hours to finish a great book), using the precious few hours of me-time that fall between the kids' bedtime and my own.

When I was a few chapters from the end, I took a break, put the book on the floor, and stared up at the ceiling.

"What are you doing?" My husband is used to weird behaviour from me, but he still likes an explanation every now and then.

"Just feeling."

Just feeling.

I was partway through a particularly intense scene, nearing the climax, and my emotions, along with the characters', were running a little high. This doesn't always happen when I read something - only when I read something I really love.

What book I was reading isn't really important. What was happening in the book isn't really important. After all, everyone connects to books in different ways, because our reading experiences are influenced by the way we live our lives. So it's not really the why that's important in this case, it's the how. 

How amazing that someone's words could make my heart twist, make me feel so overcome that I just needed a quick breather. How amazing that the actions of this fictional character could have such a profound impact. How amazing and how wonderful.

This is why I want to share my love of reading with my children. It's almost universally accepted that reading is "something your kids should do". There are foundations and ad campaigns targeted at getting children to love reading. This is inarguably a Great Thing, and I would never want to dispute that.

What I want to do is remind everyone why introducing your children to reading is so important.

It's because reading is transformative. It's influential. It's powerful. Reading stretches the limits of a child's imagination. Reading allows children to experience things they may otherwise miss. Most importantly, reading fosters a burgeoning sense of empathy at a fundamental time in a young person's development.

Books - at least, the very best books - challenge our worldview. They make us consider alternate perspectives. They make us acknowledge the complexity of human emotions. They make us feel.

So when I read Mr. Brown can Moo for the hundredth time, I'm happy. I'm happy because my daughter is engaged, enthusiastic, and frankly adorable when she boom boom booms! along with Mr. Brown. But I'm also excited. I'm excited because even though today it's Mr. Brown, soon it will be Diary of a Part-Time Indian, or Stargirl, or George.

Someday I'll recommend the book I just finished. I'll recommend all my favourites. Some my kids will appreciate, others they won't. We'll debate, we'll commiserate, we'll laugh, we'll discuss. And don't get me wrong, I will be so happy if my children become "critical thinkers" and have "broad vocabularies", and demonstrate any of the oft-discussed benefits of being Readers. But what I'm looking forward to the most is that moment when one of them turns to me and says "Mom, I just feel..."

Because I know. I know, my babies, what it's like to just feel. And whether that feeling is one of sadness, joy, anger, bitterness, hope, or excitement, the real magic is being able to feel it at all.

So for now I can find the joy in a fluffy dog or a pop-up tree, but I dream of the day when a book truly makes an imprint on their lives, as so many have for me.     

Building a Library

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.” 

― Astrid Lindgren

Something I thought about all the time during my first pregnancy was building up my daughter's library. Reading to her was the thing I was most looking forward to, and I couldn't wait to share all the books that I had loved as a little girl.

In these plans I was quite fortunate, because my parents had kept the extensive collection they had built for me as a child. They had Rubbermaid tubs filled with books in their basement, just waiting for baby J to come and rifle through them.

However, the vast majority of those books, even if they have hard covers, have paper pages. I had one soft, plush, toy-book, and one board book (a much older version of this) as a baby. I'm not sure if this is because board books weren't really "a thing" thirty years ago or if it's because my parents lived in outport Newfoundland, hundreds of kilometres away from even a second-hand bookstore, but that's the way things worked out. In any case, none of the books were very baby friendly, so I slowly began to pull my own collection together.

In all honesty, it wasn't really a hardship. It gave me the best of both worlds: reusing favourite books from my childhood while getting to buy new books for the baby to enjoy. Plus, as there are no Indie bookstores in St. John's (one day I will change this!), all those extra books meant tons of Plum Points on my Chapters member card!

In a perfect world, I would have had a perfectly designed reading nook in my daughter's nursery. I would have decorated it with my favourite quotes and picked out an amazing bookshelf. I would have painstakingly decided which books to feature and in which order they should be placed (sorry to all the pedants out there, I don't alphabetize!). Instead, because J was born during my last week of medical school and I was getting ready to move to Ontario for residency, her new books were popped into a clear plastic tub and arranged from biggest to smallest. Not quite what I had been envisioning, and unfortunately this setup continued in our rental home in Ontario, as there wasn't really any space (or extra funds) for a fancy reading nook.

Still, it was the act of picking out those books that was really special. Rifling through shelves, searching for the perfect selection, envisioning what it would be like to flip through the pages with my daughter. I received some books as baby shower gifts, others from family members who understand how much reading means to me, and a few from friends whose children had outgrown them, but the vast majority I picked out myself. I spent more on baby books than I did on clothes, and that trend has continued over my nearly eighteen months as a mother.

I will never tire of picking out books for my little ones, just as I'll never tire of reading to them.

Daycare Woes

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." 

- A.A. Milne. 

Before we ever talked about having our own kids, my husband told me that his dream job was a stay-at-home father. I was vehemently against having kids until the exact moment that I wasn't (and then I was obsessed - I don't do things by halves), so I just kind of cringed, wondered why, and led the conversation elsewhere. 

Now that we have two children and I'm a medical resident, I am so unbelievably grateful that my husband wants to stay at home. 

I'm a worrier. I worry about how to parent, whether I'm doing things right, what foods to feed my kiddies, how I could be doing things better, and whether, despite my best efforts, they will turn out okay. I'm sure most parents are like this. I also worry, when my daughter walks along the top floor of the village mall, that she'll somehow squeeze through the impossibly small space between bars and plummet downward (she won't); I worry, when she steps one toe out on the lawn, that I'll have a spontaneous seizure and she'll run into traffic (I'm perfectly healthy); I worry that in the two seconds it takes me to let the dog out, she'll drop a huge book on her brother, give him internal bleeding, and then move all evidence before I can even suspect a thing (seriously, what?); and I worry that the minute I leave them with someone who isn't a family member any number of horrible things will happen. 

It makes me feel happy (and safe and sane) knowing that our kids are being looked after by one of the two people who love them most in the world. 

Because my husband stays at home, it has taken until today, nearly 18 months after J was born, for me to be forced into working through that anxiety. 

Since my husband and I have been embarrassingly sedentary since my first pregnancy, we decided to join a gym near our house. The gym is lovely, and has a drop-in day care program, which is brilliant and convenient. Today was our first work out, so after breakfast this morning we dropped the kids off with the childcare attendant, and...walked away. 

It was painful. Painful and horrible and anxiety-provoking. But I stayed at the gym for nearly an hour, and my husband stopped me (citing, correctly, that J would just get upset if she caught me peeping in) from doing unnecessary check-ups. 

When we went to get them at the end of our hour, they were completely immersed. Well, the baby was napping, but he was napping while surrounded by other children, so there's that. 

J, of course, was sitting next to a little girl her age, "reading" her a book. Really, I shouldn't have expected anything different. 

Welcome

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

Has anyone said it better? I doubt it, though if Vonnegut had ever been to Newfoundland, he might rethink that 'hot in the summer' bit. Long before I ever had kids I knew I wanted a print of this quote to hang in their library.

That's right: my fictional kids had their own library.

Now I have two kids and a better understanding of the kind of mansion you'd need in order for your kids to have their own library, but I still love the quote. I love Vonnegut. I love my babies. I love people being nice to other people. And I love books.

If you love any of those things, then you should stick around.

The whole "it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert" mantra is apparently a myth that has been debunked, but if there's anything in which I would consider myself an expert, it's books. Reading them, discussing them, sharing them. One of my major parenting goals is raising readers, and so far it seems to be working out.

So I guess whether or not you love books yourself, if you also want to raise a reader, then you should stick around. Talk to me about books.

Welcome.