Preemptively Banning Books is No Way to Curate a Collection.

My experience with book challenges and removal

Oct 08, 2023

Victoria Waddle surrounded by banned books that she's read including: Beloved by Toni Morrison; The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier; Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya; The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien; The Color Purple by Alice Walker and several others. — That’s me, surrounded by some of the banned and challenged books that I’ve read. My library book club was meeting after school during Banned Books Week. We were taking photos of the students in front of a height chart to represent being booked for a crime. Each of them had a banned book or two that they’d read. Then they suggested I have a turn, so we gathered some of my favorite books.

Removing library books from the shelf for later review is essentially banning them, no matter what the censors say. The following essay is about my experience with book removal. I’ve included a detailed discussion of a book that I removed after a complaint. The goal is to show how much work and thought go into book selection and deselection—the seriousness of the process. I know Substack isn’t set up for it, but I’ve added footnotes because if you are unfamiliar about some of what’s going on right now in school libraries, you’ll probably think I’m making it up. So I’m citing some sources.

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Borrowing Empathy:

The Case for Allowing School Librarians to Do Their Job

With school librarians being routinely vilified in the last few years, I’m thinking about the book challenges I had in my twenty-plus years as a high school librarian. Those were much less threatening to me and my livelihood than challenges are today. They were from individuals rather than well-coordinated onslaughts from national organizations. (1)

Though the challenges did cause me some sleepless nights, I got through all of them intact. My nemesis was an individual woman who was employed, not by the school district, but by the county. She was assigned to my campus as a classroom aide, but routinely came into the library to watch me, report on me, and find titles to challenge. That was unnerving, but she wasn’t followed by a tsunami of incensed people. When it finally got to be too much and her unwarranted intrusions were interfering with my ability to get my job done, I called her supervisor at the county and threatened to file a hostile workplace complaint. The woman stopped spying on me and, as far as I know, instead spent her time doing her job.

My first year as a teacher librarian was the 1995-6 school year, almost thirty years ago. We didn’t have many book challenges from the working class and impoverished parents of our students. I think they were pretty busy trying to put food on the table. When a challenge did come, it was about required classroom reading. Parents sometimes complained about J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye because of foul language and immoral behavior or about Arthur Miller’s The Crucible because it was a story of witchcraft. We’d meet with parents; they didn’t budge. Their kids were always offered alternative reading assignments, and the issue usually ended there, without drama.

However, conservative members of the school’s staff would periodically go to the principal to complain that specific titles in the library were inappropriate. One complained that a book represented Christopher Columbus as less than a great hero. But the volume was a collection of primary source documents, so the challenge was dropped. Another time a teacher's aide was in the library with a child care class, offered by the Homemaking Department. (Yes, things have changed.) I’d received a mini grant to purchase picture books for the students to read to the children who would be in their care the following semester. The students were perusing the titles and brainstorming in groups about what makes a good children’s book. They noted the illustrations, the number of words on a page, whether the books rhymed, and if they contained humor or a poignancy that a small child could grasp. At the end of the period, each student checked out a favorite.

The school population was majority Latine, but quite diverse, and I’d tried to get a variety of books representing different peoples. The teacher’s aide who’d come in with the class informed the principal that I’d purchased a picture book with, as a central character, a Black rural grandmother who chewed tobacco. I’d already come to have a dim view of the complainant and wondered if she didn’t like the tobacco chewing or the color of the characters. This was so long ago, I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was a sweet story about the love between a grandmother and her grandchild. When I brought it to the principal, he read it (which took all of a minute), rolled his eyes, and told me I could keep it.

Sexual Content:

The Primary Reason for Book Bans

Every other complaint I’d fielded over the years always centered on the sexual content of the books. While we had a specific challenge policy, I never met a principal who wanted to use it. The policy required that a parent or staff member complete specific steps in a book challenge, which included reading the entire text. For administrators, the key concern was that the challenge not go to the school board and become public.

Victoria Waddle in her office holding multiple copies of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. — That’s me again, holding multiple copies of *The Fault in Our Stars*, which I purchased through a DonorsChoose funding opportunity. FiOS is currently being challenged and in parts of Indiana, has been removed to the adult section of public libraries. As the author, John Green, states, he wrote the book about teens for teens.

My first principal was worried about this in an almost paranoid way. Though no one had complained about the books, he required me to move all of the volumes in the Need to Know Library series to the reference shelves, where students could look at them but not check them out. These were short, informative texts written at a low reading level. Their titles began with the words Everything You Need to Know About and included Your Parents’ Divorce, STDs, Bulimia, Homosexuality, Teen Marriage, Grieving, Tattoos, etc. They covered a lot of ground. Thankfully, the principal found his way out of the district and we were able to put the books where students could find them. They were quite popular. (2)

My next principal was not prone to preventative censorship, but he wasn’t up for a fight over a challenge either. An extremely popular nonfiction book was The Go Ask Alice Book of Answers: A Guide to Good Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Health by Columbia University's Health Education. (This is not the Beatrice Sparks ‘teen journal.’ More on that in a minute.) This was a frank book of answers to all the sorts of questions a teen might have. Some of the questions were about how to get rid of gas or other socially embarrassing things. But most were about specific sex acts, pregnancy, birth control, STDs, and the like. We owned tens of copies. It was wildly popular because the answers were informative, without judgment, and discussed topics that most teens were too embarrassed to ask anyone about.

Unfortunately, when a staff member, who saw a student reading a copy during Silent Sustained Reading time, complained to the principal, he insisted that we get rid of all the copies. I ended up giving them to the public library down the road so the student could check them out there. This, of course, was an imperfect solution as most of the students didn’t drive and many did not live within walking distance of the public library or had old fines from childhood that prevented them from checking out any books.

Every once in a while, the superintendent would call and ask if I had read a particular book. It was clear someone was complaining to him, but it could have been from any of the high schools in the district. I always had read the book he inquired about and would give him a summary and some background about why I found it worthy of a place on the shelf. He never directly removed any books from my library.

This was generally how book challenges went. We won a few, we lost more. I felt the banned titles were a loss to the students. But no one ever called me a pedophile for my choices (3) and no one formed a board of parents (4) to analyze each book before I could include it in the library. Over the decades as I updated the collection, people complained more routinely about books such as Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out, but I never had to worry about going to prison for thirty days or paying a fine because of it. (5)

I was just trying to serve all the students’ reading needs. And to serve everyone meant there would be book objections fairly regularly. Yet, no book in the library was required reading. Students were free to pick and choose, to step away from anything they or their parents found unsuitable.

Mistakes can be Corrected

Teens are Resilient

That’s not to say that teacher librarians never make a mistake in book selection any more than parents never make a mistake in raising their children. People are fallible, mistakes can be corrected, and, particularly in high school, it’s good to remember that students' lives are not destroyed by library books. Kids are resilient, and by the time they're fourteen, they've been through far worse than picking up the wrong book.

Throughout the twenty-two years of my library work, a book that was perennially popular was Beatrice Sparks’ Go Ask Alice. It was already an old book in the 1990s (I’d read it as a teen), one that had been falsely represented as a teen journal. By the late 1990s, it was becoming clear that Sparks had made the whole thing up. I believe we never had a challenge of the title, even though it has some harrowing scenes, including repeated rape and prostitution in exchange for drugs, because it’s a cautionary tale about coming to ruin through illicit drug use. I talked it over with the library technician and we decided to keep our copies, but to remove the spine labels indicating they were a biography and shelve them in the fiction section.

I recently read in Ron Charles’ “Book Club” newsletter for the Washington Post that “a notice at the front of the Simon & Schuster paperback now plainly states: ‘This book is a work of fiction.’” (6) I thought finally.

How a Book Challenge Should Proceed

I once removed a book from the library collection by choice.

I had been a teacher librarian for four years in 1999 when a student asked if she could speak to me about a book. She set a mass market paperback on the circulation desk counter. That’s My Baby by Norma Klein. “You should read this,” she said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for the library.” She appeared too embarrassed to go into detail, except that it was very frankly sexual. She was pleasant enough. In those days, we sometimes had civil conversations about books while disagreeing, and this was one of those times.

Because the student was so earnest and made the effort to talk to me directly, I promised to read the novel and checked it out. She continued to visit the library and check out other books, apparently no worse off for her negative reading experience.

To make every single book go through a censorship committee composed of people with indeterminate qualifications means very few books will ever make it into the library.

I’m a liberal reader and allowed my children to read whatever interested them. I knew a few things about Norma Klein at the time. She was regularly on the American Library Association’s Challenged and Banned Books list. According to her obituary in The New York Times, (7) “Because of their subject matter, many of Ms. Klein's books sparked considerable controversy, and a 1986 American Library Association survey found that nine of her novels had been removed from libraries. In a 1986 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Klein said: ‘I'm not a rebel, trying to stir things up just to be provocative. I'm doing it because I feel like writing about real life.’”

She dealt in a frank manner with all sorts of subjects of interest to teens—sex, abortion, adultery, divorced parents, step siblings, half siblings, homosexuality, and more. I’d read one of Klein’s books—No More Saturday Nights. It’s the story of a high school boy who impregnates his girlfriend. She wants to give the boy up for adoption, but he goes to court to secure parental rights. Then he goes off to University and tries to balance single parenthood with college life. Of course, this doesn’t work out well. I could see why teens would enjoy the book, and it did show how difficult parenting can be, but on the whole—as an adult with three kids—I found the novel exceedingly silly. So I didn’t expect That’s My Baby to be much different.

Published in 1988 by Viking Books, That's My Baby had been purchased by the previous librarian and had solid reviews. It’s the story of an eighteen-year-old high school student (Paul) who engages in an affair with his married twenty-two-year-old neighbor (Zoe) after being hired to walk her dog (Baby). Paul is also a budding playwright and has success at a young age that seems fantastical. He decides to go to college close to home in order to remain near Zoe. She becomes pregnant and breaks off the affair before Paul leaves. When he returns to see her a few years later, he realizes the baby is Zoe’s husband’s because she looks just like him. Dilemma dodged. He’s wiser and looks back at the affair as something bittersweet.

I could see why the sex in the story made the student uncomfortable. While reviews of Klein’s work indicate that the sex in her books isn’t as explicit as it is in adult titles, it was in My Baby. Here’s one of the scenes from the affair:

“Is anything wrong?”
She looked at me and then out the window. “Well, it’s just I’m on the tail end of my period.”
“So?”
“Paul [Zoe’s husband—he has the same name as the protagonist teen.] hates to do it, even then. Something about the blood.”
“Is he an Orthodox Jew?”
“No, it’s just . . . I guess the smell, or maybe the idea. I just wanted you to know.”
I went over and embraced her. “Everything about you smells wonderful. I couldn’t care less, if you don’t.”
Thank you, oh Lord, for making her husband such a consummate fool. I kissed Zoe everywhere, even between her legs and there was no smell except her usual warm, intoxicating female scent. I used to think doing that to a woman would be sickening, but to do it to Zoe while she lies there in a trance of pleasure, murmuring my name, is the greatest high on earth. When we made love, she was moister than usual, but I didn’t care. If anything, it was a kind of double turn-on, doing something to her that no person had ever done before. When I withdrew, a spurt of bright red blood came out on the sheet. There was a slight trace of blood on my penis.” (118-119 )

I have to admit, this made me uncomfortable. It was very unusual for a YA book published in the 1980s. But then, teens learn about sex. Should the book be withdrawn from the collection? A contemporary review in Publisher’s Weekly (8) found that My Baby “falls into a murky area between” YA and adult fiction “being a bit too sweet and juvenile for the second category, and perhaps a little too sophisticated for the first.” Nevertheless they found that “though the twists of [Paul’s] fate are fairly predictable, they amount to a warm and funny coming-of-age story set against a strong contemporary background.”

As I thought about My Baby, two things bothered me.

The relationship was between a high school boy and a married adult woman. Paul is eighteen—technically an adult—but he is no more mature than his seventeen-year-old friends. And he’s still in high school. At one point before they begin their sex life, Zoe tells Paul “You’re just a baby still.” I thought she was right.

After their first kiss, Zoe responds: “This is terrible. . . .This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m married, you’re just in high school. There are probably a million laws against this.” (100)

A few pages later: “She looked like she was gearing herself up for a speech. ‘Paul, look, while you were down there with Baby [the dog], I was thinking. This is all my fault. I did lead you on. I do—you are—I do find you terribly attractive. Okay.” She raised her hand. “I confess. . . . But this is wrong. We can’t do it again. I couldn’t live with myself. I’m not this kind of person.” (102)

Paul’s response to this is to think he now understands why people in love kill each other.

A second reason I objected to the book was that it was published in 1988 and makes no mention of AIDS or STDs, even though AIDS was a leading cause of death in young American adults at the time. A contemporary School Library Journal review (9) found that “despite the omission of even the most casual references to safe sex, Klein tells this contemporary story realistically and sympathetically.” This wasn’t enough for me. Even if the couple throws caution to the wind, there needs to be some realization of what that could have cost them. I felt Klein was irresponsible in not working that mention into the story since protease inhibitors didn’t become available until 1995 (10), and with them, the serious reduction in deaths from AIDS.

That’s My Baby was the only book I ever chose to remove. We still had plenty of titles by Klein, who was a prolific writer. She died in 1989 at age 50. By the early aughts, no one was checking out her books. (11) Realistic YA books had become more of a norm and even those would soon be eclipsed by novels set in dystopian futures. Complaints centered around books like The Hunger Games. Today, any book about LGBTQIA+ characters or the history of Black Americans is open game.

I wonder about my own choices, and if I saw too much in the unequal dynamics of the Paul/Zoe affair and in the omission of a safe sex mention. Which is to say, making these judgments is difficult. I recently checked GoodReads to see if anyone reviewed My Baby and found six reviews, which all seemed to be by adults remembering the book fondly from their teen years. They hailed Klein as a feminist and enjoyed the fact that she discussed real issues rather than whether the female characters would get dates to the prom. So maybe I was wrong.

For Book Riot, in 2019, Kelly Jensen offered Hey YA: Extra Credit which is described as a “short-form podcast, running about 20 minutes in length, focusing on a single title of Klein’s each episode.” Seven of Klein’s YA titles were discussed but none of them were That’s My Baby. In August 2019, Jensen wrapped up with her own experience of Klein’s books (which she read as an adult), but again, no That’s My Baby. I was sorry about that as Jensen has a nuanced view of Klein's books. She wrote:

These stories serve as a lens to what matters more—the incongruent, messy, confusing reality that is being a teenager and the incongruent, messy, confusing reality that is being an adult. These stories were ahead of their time while being entirely of their time in a way that, 30-plus years on, is surprisingly refreshing. Certainly, the soapiness and melodrama become tiresome, particularly when read in a short span of time. The bigger messages, though, about the ways in which we don’t quite know how to connect and relate to one another in meaningful, authentic, and honest ways—as well as the ways we screw around and screw up while trying to figure those things out—thrive and endure. (12)

With that, I heartily agree. Messiness is what good YA novels are about. We agree or disagree, and we should be having conversations about that. But to make every single book go through a censorship committee composed of people with indeterminate qualifications means very few books will ever make it into the library. It took me weeks (after work hours) to read That’s My Baby, check the reviews, and then ruminate over what to do. And that was one book! Censorship committees do far more harm than good by reducing the opportunity for teens to become readers. Those today who believe they can shelter almost-adults from the complexity of the real world will learn too late that they are making a crucial error. People exist authentically as themselves and their real presence, history, and experience in the world cannot be altered with censorship. What gentler way is there to first meet and engage with the unknown than in a book?

As one of my library and writer friends says, the library is a place where you can borrow empathy until you own it. Opening a book can be an opening of the heart. That’s something parents shouldn’t be afraid of. If you would like to support school librarians and their mission, please check out the American Library Association’s webpage at https://www.ala.org/advocacy/fight-censorship.

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