I made my decision: to bookshop.
This afternoon I sat at the bar in the cellar making an inventory list. Yes, I have a cellar. But what we call a high cellar so almost on street level. Yes, it has a bar. And that room is where I will place my bookshop.
I’m going to call it The Story Cellar.
While I was doing inventory or, in less fancy terms, putting the titles into a spreadsheet, I thought a lot about which categories of books I have to sell. Lots of fiction and its various subcategories and the odd piece of non-fiction: history books, personal development, biographies … All of them are my books. Books that I have had on my shelves. Books whose turn it is to move on to a new home, because I will not read them again. I have taken what I needed from them and have been glad to receive it. Now it someone else’s turn to take whatever wisdom, inspiration, comfort or laughter they can from them.
The more titles I typed into my sheet, the more aware I became of how many of them have, at some point, been banned in the US. I say the US because they seem to be the keenest of the English-speaking countries when it comes to deciding which books are and are not appropriate. Last night I also noticed that they are consistently also the country where, at least on TV, parents consistently freak out whenever two teenagers of the opposite sex are alone in a room together. I’m not sure if there is a connection, but since a lot book banning can be laid at the door of zealous parents, perhaps there is? At least that is how it seems to someone outside the US.
US TV shows also have women going off to fight crime in 6 inch spikes and long flowing hair, which any woman would tell you is ridiculous, but I digress.
15% of my stock has been banned. These are books I have studied at school, been taught at university, written papers about, but in the author’s home country, people are not allowed to read them. Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate, is banned. During the three years of my BA in English Literature, Toni Morrison was an unfailing part of the curriculum.
I think of the books I loved as a child. And the books they made us read in school. Of which at least one, Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume, is a banned book. It never spoke to me but I know some of the other kids in class found great strength within its pages. When I arrived at university we were told that there is no absolute truth, that every person’s interpretation is different, that meaning is different and deferred. So why should one person’s opinion determine whether or not I am allowed to read a book? Why should they keep me from the lessons that I may find within its pages, because they believe that their interpretation is the only truth?
Tell me that I can’t read a book and I won’t rest until I have turned the last page.
Yes, I know this is not a national-wide ban. It is done at much lower levels than that. But sometimes I wonder whether book banning is just one step away from book burning?
The Story Cellar 