The first time I knowingly read a banned book, I was a 15-year-old on a voracious historical fiction kick. I went through the Greco-Roman phase and read everything my local library and school library had to offer. On the recommendation of my high school librarian (one of the great champions of literature in my life) I read a great story set in bronze-age Europe. Still I wanted more. I was out of books but still had an appetite for fiction set in early European civilizations.
That’s when my high school librarian came to the rescue once again. There was a book she loved, set in pre-historic Europe, that was too controversial to order for the school library. There was a rape scene in it. More shocking than that… it was a rape scene between two different species of early-human. This is a book that set off alarm bells for sex, violence, evolution, and race. She knew me. She knew my family encouraged my literary appetites and she knew I would love this book. She checked it out from a public library on her account and gave it to me to read.
It was Clan of the Cave Bear, first in the Earth’s Children series by Jean Auel. To this day it’s one of my favorite books. At the time, only the first two books had been published. As the years went by and the books came out, I read them all. My first hardback new-release book purchase was The Mammoth Hunters from the Earth’s Children series. The last book in the series, The Land of Painted Caves, I purchased on my nook decades later. I guess the Earth’s Children series also represents the evolution of my reading life: from free library books to collecting a personal library to a digital collection on my e-readers.
Clan of the Cave Bear was the only banned book that I read, knowing it had been banned. The rest of the time, I would just read as my interests lead. Once a year, on banned book week, I would see lists and pictures of banned books and look at them in confusion (what could possibly be objectionable about *this* book?) or shock (really?! That book was banned?) or contemplative mourning of ignorance (how sad for the human race that we can’t get beyond our feelings of fillintheblank over fillintheblank.)
Stay tuned! in my next post I will explore a collection of banned books of particular appeal to the wander-reader. The Earth’s Children series just might make an appearance.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie