Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Submitted by Kavita

Now, I’m not certain if this was the way things were for everybody, but when I was little, Halloween wasn’t about wearing as little as possible and making the most tenuous connection to a costume. It was about sitting in a circle with a group of friends, eating more candy than was conceivably healthy, and reading aloud from Alvin Schwartz’s series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The books are a collection of stories culled from popular folklore and urban legends, with possibly the most terrifying black-and-white illustrations ever. The illustrations are half the effect.

The books are divided into sections, each of which has a selection of stories. Some are scary, some are silly, and the placement is very well-thought-out. Usually, after a particularly frightening selection, you’ll find a short poem or what seems to be another scary story but which turns out silly in the end ( the example I remember is ‘The Viper’ being placed directly after ‘The Babysitter’ ). And ‘The Red Spot’ gives me nightmares to this day—but that’s mainly because spiders are involved.

So many of my friends recall having grown up with these books and none of us have ever understood why they were banned. Too scary? But that’s the point! I had teachers who read them aloud to us around Halloween, with the lights turned down. It was fantastic. What I also know is that I learnt many things from those books. Such as ‘Never buy a dog in Mexico’, ‘Always look in the back seat of your car before you sit down’, and ‘Do not offer rides to hitchhikers if you’re alone and it’s dark’. The Scary Stories series also gave me an appetite for ghost stories that I’ve never truly lost.

My suspicion is that parents have grown far more protective of their children since we were growing up. I think it’s a shame, as ghost stories were one of my favourite pastimes growing up and I’ve never lost my appetite for them. Any other ghost-lovers out there?

Submitted by DebR

Bio/Intro:As a way to support freedom from censorship, I made a pledge at the beginning of this week to choose one book I hadn't yet read from the list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 - 2000, read it, and review it on my blog. Earlier this week I went to our local library, carrying a list of a half-dozen books from the challenged list - all classics I had never gotten around to reading yet. Unfortunately, our small-town library has some serious funding problems and as I went down the list, I realized that all five of my first choices either weren't in the card catalog at all or were already checked out.

It was with a sinking heart that I realized that the only book they had out of the half-dozen titles I'd brought with me on a scrap of paper was "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, a book I had managed to successfully avoid throughout all my years in school and beyond, because I was so sure I wouldn't like it. I had even avoided watching any of the various movie adaptations of it over the years, although I saw enough previews of the last one that, as I read the book, I couldn't help but see and hear Gary Sinise and John Malkovich as George and Lennie.

I still SO didn't want to read it, but a pledge is a pledge, so I checked the blasted thing out, brought it home, and finished it later that afternoon.

So this is the part where I tell you how wrong I was to think I wouldn't like it, right? Um, no. The story had wonderfully spare and evocative language, it raised a lot of thought-provoking questions, it haunted me - it still haunts me...I'm still thinking of it days later - and I detested it every bit as much as I thought I would.

What we have here is a basic incompatibility of philosophy. I'm an unflagging optimist, who believes in things like love, hope, and redemption. My core outlook on life is that as long as we have breath, there's some sort of hope, however slim, that things can get better. Steinbeck, on the other hand, seems to have been very much the pessimist, whose outlook on life was "life's a bitch and then you die"...or "life's a bitch and then you kill your only friend in the world."

I can also see very clearly why this book has been challenged over the years. Unlike some of the books on the list, whose presence on it baffles me, I can see a lot that is offensive in "Of Mice and Men." There's cruelty, overt racism, pervasive sexism, and then there's the huge question that is the point of the story: is it ever ok - ever merciful - for one human being to kill another?

Someone reading the previous two paragraphs might come to the conclusion that I would support this book being challenged, or even banned, but they'd be dead wrong. The very fact that the story contains those sorts of elements and raises those difficult questions is a reason it should be read. It's a reason I probably should have read it a long time ago, even though I disliked it intensely. It's the reason that I would include it as required reading if I was teaching an American Lit class, and wouldn't let someone like me get away with avoiding it for so long. Refusing to look at the hard questions and ugly problems of life doesn't make them go away, because we can't fight what we won't face. That's a truth even a die-hard optimist can support.

My subjective grade on the bell curve of my personal biases: D (for dismal, depressing and defeatist)

My objective grade on the merits of the story: A

Submitted by Missy

“It is the morning of the funeral and I’m tearing my room apart, trying to find the right shoes to wear.” With these words, Judy Blume takes us into the world of Davis “Davy” Wexler, a fifteen-year-old girl struggling with the recent murder of her father. 

Unable to articulate her intense grief, Davy internalizes her sorrow and passes out several times at school.  On doctor’s advice, her mother takes the entire Wexler clan, including Davy’s seven-year-old brother Jason and her cat Minka, on a journey from Atlantic City to Los Almos, New Mexico.  What begins as a summer trip drags on; soon Davy and Jason are being parented by their fearful Aunt Bitsy and strident Uncle Walter, their mother having wilted under the weight of her panic and sorrow.

Trying to escape her own numbness, Davy takes an impulsive bike ride to the nearby canyons, where she meets a young man calling himself simply “Wolf.” They strike up a friendship that provides them both with joy they can’t find elsewhere.  Davy dreams of marrying Wolf; he fondly nicknames her “Tiger Eyes”.  Thanks to this chance meeting, Davy begins to show an interest in the outside world again; she takes up old hobbies, develops an interest in astronomy and tries to help her friend Jane, who has reacted to intense parental pressure by turning to alcohol.  But then Wolf disappears, and Davy is left to wonder if he really will come back “when the lizards run”.

Blume is, as always, an engaging writer.  She peels back the layers of Davy’s grief expertly while juggling several major social issues in a voice that avoids moralization.  Characterization is beautifully done; Ms. Blume has populated this book with average folks struggling beneath the weight of prejudice, sorrow and fear.  Be forewarned that Tiger Eyes includes the forthrightness that marks of her YA writing – Davy’s father’s death is portrayed in all of its blood-splattered horror, there are segments dealing with sexuality and alcohol consumption, and there is mature language.  Also, as with most Blume novels, the moral is ‘things will get better’, not ‘everything will be all right forever’. 

I’m a longtime Judy Blume fan and was surprised to find out she’s currently the most-banned author on the ALA’s list, with five books named (the most often challenged is Forever).  The sad irony of this is that adolescents barred from reading books like Tiger Eyes are the ones who most need a frank author like Blume in their lives.  This book teaches its readers not to fear the future; to embrace the unexpected while questioning the choices of their elders; that grieving is a natural process and it’s different for everyone.  Most importantly, it teaches that there’s a reason to go on when someone you love dies.  If you know a child who needs those life lessons – or if you’re in need of a refresher course for yourself –Tiger Eyes is worth a read.

Bret Easton Ellis is one of the young generation of disaffected druggie writers (the literary Brat Pack), along with Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York). His first book, Less than Zero, was practically a Catcher in the Rye rip-off (naturally missing the real point of Catcher, as so many people do), but by the time he published American Psycho in 1990, he'd come into his own.

Patrick Bateman is a man of high fashion, high society, and high stakes. He wears expensive suits, eats at the finest restaurants, and makes crazy business deals. He has strong opinions on many aspects of culture, especially music – he's a big fan of Huey Lewis and the News and Genesis. He is possibly the ideal man of the late '80s New York upper-class business culture, except for one thing – he kills people. Graphically. In many awful ways. And he gets away with it. Or does he?

Patrick is a wonderful narrator; he sounds so wonderfully sane for the first two-thirds of the book. He's an excellent guide to and navigator of the wealthy elite social scene of his time. If you want to know anything about fashion, especially men's, from the eighties, then he's your man. There are a couple of chapters that are delightful essays on the careers, prior to 1990, of several musical artists including the ones mentioned above. Behind his urbane exterior, though, his thoughts are sometimes so extreme and off the wall that one simply must laugh:

But she's not listening; she keeps blabbering something in the same spastic, foreign tongue. I have never firebombed anything and I start wondering how one goes about it – what materials are involved, gasoline, matches . . . or would it be lighter fluid?

Despite his affability, Patrick has many obvious flaws. He isn't a reliable narrator at all. Although he's polite to everyone, he's horribly racist (the woman in the above quote is a Chinese laundry-owner) and he sees women as objects for both his sexual and murderous lust. He doesn't have any patience for anyone who gets in his way and, oh yeah, he tortures and kills people. Other than that, of course, he's a fine, worthy citizen.

The reason the book was banned is fairly obvious: graphic sex and torture scenes, often a combination of the two. This book probably isn't 'appropriate' for anyone over OR under eighteen. Sex, torture, or stream-of-consciousness writing aren't to everyone's tastes; combine the three and you have a trifecta of ban-ability. I happen to have enjoyed the book quite a bit and if you can see past the shocking language and events, it's both funny and a delightful commentary on appearances. That someone could be a serial killer and still be an upstanding member of society based on his Brooks Brothers suits is sad but, in Ellis's Manhattan, accurate.

While I'm not sure I would actually recommend this to anyone, I'd still assign it an A-.

Submitted by Maya

(Warning: Some spoilerish comments included, because they refer to the story’s banned status. Hopefully this isn’t too big a violation of review procedure considering the book is over a quarter century old).

The story begins with a 13-year-old girl alone in the Alaskan wilderness, desperately yet systematically trying to establish communication with a wolf pack as her last means of avoiding starvation. As opening hooks go, the question of how someone so young got into such a predicament is powerful.  The author is in no hurry to answer, with the full background sprinkled a paragraph at a time throughout the story in between descriptions of current efforts to stay alive in a landscape moving from autumn to arctic winter.  Survival isn’t just a physical challenge, but a mental and emotional one as well; the heroine knows that singing to herself, inventing rhymes and dances, reliving happy memories, and imagining her future life are just as important as creating shelter and locating edible plants. And it is through these efforts to keep spirits up that the author weaves in a deeper theme: the duality that shapes all aspects of the heroine’s life. Is she Julie, the girl forced by government school regulations to move to a far-away town, who learns English, and discovers the wonders of modern life? Or is she Miyax, the girl raised by her father in traditional ways after her mother’s early death, learning about land, animals, and self-sufficience?

It is a difficult question, for herself as well as her people, and contributes to the crisis that sends her fleeing into the wilderness.  The ill-tempered great aunt who forced Julie’s father to allow her to move to town at age 9 isn’t motivated by Julie’s best interests, but by her own wish to have a live-in assistant as she ages. In a loving attempt to provide protection, Julie’s father makes an agreement with an old friend that Julie can come live with that family as the son’s bride when she is 13 in case anything ever happens to him and she finds her aunt unbearable. The father eventually fails to return after a hunting trip and is presumed dead.  The family shows up to claim her as their daughter-in-law, assuring Julie that Daniel (whose age is never revealed) will be ‘like a brother’. It becomes clear that the father-in-law is alcoholic, engages in bouts of wife battery, and that Daniel may be a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. Provoked by taunts that he ‘can’t mate her’, one day he angrily attempts to consummate the marriage. He fails, but threatens to try again the next day. Julie is so traumatized by the assault that she gathers clothes and tools and flees, thinking to walk across the tundra for a week to a ferry point and ultimately, live with her pen-pal in wondrous-sounding San Francisco. But because of the time of year, the natural guiding points she counted on don’t exist. She gets lost and is adopted into the wolf clan. So adept does she become at survival, and so convinced of the wisdom of her traditions vs. the evil of modern ways (symbolized by the hunters who shoot the alpha wolf from a bush plane purely for sport) that she ultimately has to make a choice: remain in the wild, relying only on animals for contact? Or live with people and find a way to blend the old ways with the new, hunting with town life, native language with English?

In terms of bannable issues, it is not difficult to understand that sexual assault of a minor, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence are sensitive issues in a book targeted at young readers.  I first read this book at about 9 or 10 having found it in the library at school, and as a sheltered child recall feeling horrified by the rape scene and the husband not only beating up his wife but doing so repeatedly. The feelings then were so intense that they came rushing back when I saw the title on a recommended reading list my son brought home from school. I was startled to see it recommended for Grades 3+ , apparently based solely on the complexity of the language.  Considering the content, as a concerned parent (and with the knowledge that some children will not have access to sensitive adults with whom to discuss troubling content, as was the case for me) I would have felt more comfortable with a target group at least equivalent in age to the heroine, rather than younger (i.e. Grade 6 or 7). That being said, the story is so rich in valuable talking points (critical need for conservation, cultural change, chemical dependence, family communication, sex according to expectations of peers vs. sex according to expectations of partner) that it would be an extreme case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to bar this novel from young readers entirely.

In terms of writing, the author has taken an intriguing premise and skillfully kept up the internal and external tension, with challenges building right up until the final question. Although I can’t judge from a native person’s perspective, it seemed to me that she described culture and traditions with a great deal of respect despite inclusion of some harsh realities. As a trained naturalist, the author was also able to make the landscape and wildlife come alive – so much so that this strength borders on weakness.  Specifically, the text is so caught up in Julie’s developing skill at animal communication that the original catalyst (her damaged relationship with boys/men) is neglected. In the very last pages, there is a single sentence describing how Julie allows for the possibility that one day, there might be a boy like her who lives on the land and follows traditional ways.  As a child reader, I was comforted by this indication that not everyone would behave like Daniel.  As an adult, I am annoyed at this throw-away treatment of the book’s major conflict.  The impression given that letting enough time go by while refusing to think about an earlier assault will somehow automatically result in healing is simplistic, unbelievable, and the single outstanding flaw of the story. Long after this original publication the author wrote follow-up novels titled ‘Julie’ and ‘Julie’s Wolf Pack’ in which the topic may have been explored (I have not read them), but readers of this first novel deserved better.

Consequently, I would reduce the final grade from an A+ to an A-.