As the title says lol. I recently picked up Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, not saying I believe the book should be banned, but the question came to mind.
With so many books banned recently due to “political” agenda I was wondering if there’s any books that some people feel strongly about that shouldn’t be read.
What’s a book ban that you agree with? Whether it’s a local banned book, some school district, or whatever it may be. If the question has been asked sorry! Just joined the page 🙂
Edit:
Not saying I believe in book bans! Lol I believe the reader chooses to decide what they want to spend their time reading, just like when listening to music. I was just wondering for those that agree with a banned book or would like to see one that they believe should be.
by limegweeen
30 Comments
None. I’d rather not see Mein Kampf on the shelf, but we live in a liberal society. No bans on access provided by the public.
I don’t agree with any book bans.
I don’t think there’s really any book that should be banned in all honesty. Banning knowledge has never gone down well in any situation.
I don’t know if they exist, but if the likes of Andrew Tate and other “masculinity” influencers had books, I would support keeping them away from schools. Some children are already being poisoned.
Banning books doesn’t stop ideas.
Even De Sade’s ideas are human. I didn’t care for them (and honestly it got boring pretty quickly for me). But it’s human. The human condition has so many varied thoughts. Some of them are so universal that we all are bolstered and reinforced by them. Some of them challenge and/or disgust us. That’s human too!
The Bible. Complete made up trash.
There is nothing wrong with age appropriate book bans. Some content minors should never have access to. Nobody is banning books for Adults I mean unless you are Amazon, Google, or Apple.
I don’t agree with book bans period. I can think of all sorts of things that I find offensive but I don’t believe it’s my place to limit other people’s access, just as they shouldn’t get to limit mine because they find something offensive. The point of freedom of speech really boils down to protecting speech that people disagree with, because no one is trying to suppress speech they agree with.
I mean, schools already do take questions of appropriate content into account when stocking libraries.That’s different from a *ban* list, though, which is always political in nature rather than a question of what kids can actually comprehend for their age bracket.
There are definitely some books, particularly books classified as hate speech, that could probably be placed under restrictions (at least for libraries) where the average person can’t access them without first being shown an analysis of what makes them dangerous. It’s still important to preserve and analyze writing like that, but to be careful that we don’t allow it to spread freely in the process. That would still be a politically charged decision, though.
The Anarchist Cookbook
I don’t think books should be banned. But certain books do seem to warrant proper education and warnings about what they are before they’re accessed.
The problem is never really about which books you choose to ban, it’s about the government or the state having the power to ban them at all. If you allow the banning of any one book arbitrarily, you open the door for others to be banned arbitrarily as well.
this is like partly a joke but i’d love to just throw all coho books in a fire. and any book that’s like them tbh. that promotes and romanticises abusive and toxic relationships. that shit is aimed at young girls and is actively shaping their views on relationships. i cannot stand it and would happily watch coho books burn
None. But let’s also make sure we understand the difference between curation and “banning”. If a school chooses to stop teaching a book by a dead white guy in favor of something more inclusive but still keeps the old book in the library, it hasn’t been “banned” they’re just choosing to teach something else.
I don’t agree with bans, but I get restrictions in some cases. I wouldn’t want things that are age inappropriate or situationally inappropriate. If I found out my local high school had The Turner Diaries in the library I’d be down there with something to say about it. That’s a book that definitely tests me in terms of wanting things banned honestly.
Unpopular opinion, but I think most of the discourse around “book bans” conflates a school “banning” books with schools simply providing age-appropriate reading materials in their libraries.
I agree with all the book bans/restrictions by my country. But they’re real book bans, not these school & public library ones like in the US. Books banned/restricted in my country are ones that promote things that are illegal like pedophilia, torture, etc.
None. If I don’t like a book, I just won’t read it. If someone else chooses to read it despite knowing about its potentially offensive or disturbing content, then that is their problem, not mine. Same for all kinds of media, really. People are free to choose what to read, listen to, or watch in their free time, and it is not the government’s job to protect them from that.
Book bans are a tool solely of cowardly, censorious mental mediocrities desperate to feel important. I have zero patience for any of them.
Banning books is never ok
I don’t know that I have ever seen a case where a book was in a true sense completely “banned.” I’m not even sure what the mechanics of that would be.
In every case I’ve ever read or heard about, it has been about some school, library, or bookstore refusing to carry certain books either at their own choice or from some government pressure. I cannot think of a single case, in the US at least, where it has been made illegal to actually personally own or read any particular book. Or of any other way a book has been “banned” in totality.
This is not to say the former is okay per se, but it’s also ambiguous. If the elementary school library chooses it explicitly will not carry hentai manga, is that a “book ban”? What about Harry Potter? What about the Quran? What about Goosebumps? What about Boxcar Children? What about The Indian in the Cupboard? Which of these are “book bans”? Just the ones you or I disagree with?
Anyway, I don’t really like the idea of limiting anyone’s access to books, but any institution providing books is necessarily making decisions about what they will or won’t carry. It is concerning when government bodies influence schools against teaching what I feel are important books or books that might have content social conservatives don’t like seeing, and I am happy to argue against that. But again, I don’t know if that’s really a “ban.”
I am, however, against making it a crime to read any book. I think even if people want to read truly awful shit, they should be allowed to, and then they should be socially ostracized accordingly.
None. If the ideas exist in a book they exist elsewhere and limiting access to the book won’t stop that because it’ll be on the internet. Controversial or mature topics, themes, etc are better handled by teaching media literacy, improved education, and conversations rather than “no that books banned we won’t be discussing it”. Books often enable that conversation to be more productive and worthwhile.
It is also very important to point out that recent book bans have purposefully targeted books about and by minority groups such as LGBT+ and BIPOC through the guise of “age-appropriateness”. Yes shelve books appropriately based on content, which publishers and educators know how to asses, not by biases or politics. But a book about gay penguins isn’t going to make your kindergarten implode.
Like many have said here already, I don’t believe in book bans either…but there are certain books I would strongly, strongly discourage people from reading based on my own personal experience.
For me it was Tampa by Alyssa Nutting.
It just really wish I hadn’t read it. It made me feel like I willingly participated in viewing child porn, even though it was a fictional account. I’ve truly never had an experience with a book like this before, where I felt ashamed of finishing it because I kept reading it despite feeling like I was condoning the actions of the narrator somehow by continuing. This probably makes zero sense but after I finished it, I felt like I had done something disrespectful to actual people who have been victims of csa. Which I am sure was the intention of the author btw- to make the reader very unsettled & examine their own voyeurism. It made me wonder too – would someone who is a pedophile be encouraged or validated by the awful narrator? Would they look to it for inspiration?
The books that I would consider ban-able for their content (hateful ideas without any redeeming value, incitement to violence, instructions how to commit this violence, that sort of thing) are going to be niche enough that I’d be surprised if I ever saw them in the book store or library.
And being on the fringe of society, the people who really do want to read them would not be held back very long by a ban, so in both cases, a ban would be pointless.
I think actually it is good that these books aren’t banned, just so that normal people can read them once in a while and confirm that yes, they are indeed still completely unacceptable. If you were to ban them, people might forget after a while.
I think book bans are straight up stupid. Even if the book in question promotes harmful stuff, one can take it as a set of ideologies to avoid and look out for.
I would agree if book bans were more soft, more like PG books. Idk how it is in US, but the schools I attended (1-4, 5-8, 9-12) had each their own library and you could request a book that they could borrow from another bigger library. The ones in schools are rather limiting, but you can borrow a lot from them.
In this format, I would take the “innapropiate” books and make them PG, where a parent/legal guardian can sign a slip along with the child to borrow a book. Mind you, my idea of innapropiate would be books that cover active depressive episodes, violent acts depicted in detail (r*pe, murders, torture) for classes 1-8. I think that after 9th grade, at 14 you could grasp better the severity of those actions, their consequences and emphaty for victims, so the legal guardian isn’t required to overlook the books anymore.
Thus said, it’s just an idea, and this covers JUST the (within) school libraries. I see no reason to ban books in a public library.
It’s wild to me that Lolita is what prompted this question for you when it’s Nabokov’s argument against child exploitation. Doesn’t really make me eager to yank books out of circulation.
Absolutely none. All this censoring and deleting of the past is ludicrous.
No bans at all. But for some more controversial political books or the likes release them with commentary (like they did with mein Kampf around here) so people don’t just read bs and accept it for reality.
Actually I really like annotated books or commentaries that give you some background information in general.
None and I have my reasons:
I’m Portuguese. We lived through a fascist regime between 1933 and 1974 called Estado Novo.
Between the many atrocities that regime committed, the state police, called PIDE, banned and controlled everything that was published. They banned books and articles, music, they would cut whole sentences from books and articles. Amongst other things, of course.
I wasn’t alive when this happened (I was born in 1984, but we learn this in school.
No form of art should ever be banned.
None. I don’t believe in book bans. It seems to me that the type of people who are in charge of banning books very rarely have a good reason. Any truly horrible book which say, provides instructions on committing some atrocious act is unlikely to be easily available anyway? I think if you were the type of individual to seek out that information, wouldn’t you just like, use the internet?
I’ve come across many books I disagree with, or books which make me uncomfortable, or books which incite discussion. Probably all of them would be banned by certain groups of people who disagree with the content or themes. Which, in my opinion, is stupid. You can’t kill an idea. Go ahead, ban the book, but the knowledge and ideas are still out there. It will come back time and time again. It is much better to read the book, have a discussion, sit with those uncomfortable thoughts, examine your values. In many cases, hopefully see how society has progressed or see the work we still need to do. But those book banners don’t want that. They just want everyone to agree with whatever their ideology is. Screw that. I have a brain, and I’ll use it to read what I want and make up my own mind.