Banning books

[j d worthington]

well, you wouldn't want to scare em off would you?

Ah, that reminds me of another sort of book that was verboten: the various "holy books" of other religions (or branches of the Judaeo-Christian religion, for the matter of that). Even classical mythology was regarded with keen suspicion....

 

[Wybren]

My parents never banned me from reading, and encouraged us to read as much as we liked. When I was about 7 mum gave me "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint Exupery. Which I didn't much understand at the time, but she was all for encouraging us to be good readers. The only book which Mum ever recommended against was Anne Rice's "Cry to Heaven" and that wasn't to me, It was to my school after I had read it and she had read it. She called the library and recommended that the book only be loaned to the senior students and teachers.

 

[clovis-man]

My parents never restricted my reading. Maybe they didn't know there were prurient tomes out there waiting to be discovered. In the 1950s, when I was a young teen, they did tell me they didn't want me to watch any movies with Robert Mitchum in them. It was because of his checkered past and the fact that he had smoked a little doobie in his day. Of course, that made me want to see them even more. I'm afraid I was a disobedient child.

 

[Quokka]

I doubt my parents knew what I was reading most of them time. There would have been very few books that they'd have banned even if they did. I remember a friend lent me some of his Chopper Read books (Australian ex-criminal) at one point which they didn't think were at all appropriate but they didn't ban them. Instead I read a few, got bored and went back to reading Dune.

 

[Lilmizflashythang]

Does it count if people, put a time limit on how long you can read? Seriously my parents didn't really care what I read as long as I did something productive with my time as well. The teachers on the other hand, tended to take the books away.

There is a new book that the schools are pushing here in Texas called The Child of God, about a murdering pedafile. The parents around here are pitching a fit about it. Not that I blame them.

 

[littlemissattitude]

The only thing that was ever banned from my house when I was younger was the "Woodstock" soundtrack album (the three-disc one). If you're at all familiar with that, you'll remember the "Fish Cheer". My mother didn't appreciate that at all. Still, even after the ban, it was in the house several times...I didn't own it, but a friend did.

As far as books or movies go, however, no, nothing was ever forbidden to me. Now, my parents got kind of nervous about some of the things I read as a pre-adolescent and adolescent, but they never tried to stop me from reading anything. The library ladies were another story; they wouldn't let me check some books out of the library...Rosemary's Baby comes to mind...but I just sat in the library and read them, so their efforts were in vain.

It was funny, once when I was at a friend's house when I was about thirteen or fourteen and she showed me the top shelf of their bookcase and said those were the ones she wasn't allowed to read. I just laughed and started in, "Well, I've read that one, and that one, and that one..." There were several that I had read.

"Do your parents know you've read them?" she asked.

"Well, yeah. They bought some of them for me."

Poor girl just couldn't quite get her mind around that one.

EDITED TO ADD, for Lilmizflashythang: I was always under the impression that reading is doing "something productive". But, yeah, my mother used to tell me to stop reading and go do something. Never had much effect on me, however. It wasn't unusual to have most of the kids in the neighborhood playing in our front yard while I was inside reading. I didn't really play that well with others even back then.

 

[Ragnar]

Me and my sisters were always encouraged to read as kids and I can't remember ever being censored by my parents, even when I went through a gross horror phase in my early teens reading stuff like early James Herbert and Guy N. Smith. Although I do remember my mum taking Flowers in the Attic away from my younger sister because she thought it was unsuitable for a 10 year old - she was always a precocious reader though & my mum had to plead with the local librarian to let her join the adult library at age 11 because she'd pretty much read everything that was worth reading in the children's section.

 

[Duchessprozac]

My dad tried to keep me away from most of adult sci-fi and fantasy, although I was allowed to read many good YA novels both from my school library and by my Dad's recommendation. He passed away when I turned 13, however and my mother never took an interest in what I read so from then on I read what I could, especially the books my dad had kept away from me as I wanted to find out what was so bad about them ( To give a background, I was an avid Bladerunner, Aliens and Predator fan from the age of 8 or so which my dad had no qualms in me watching, so I had to assume what was contained in these verboten books must have been much worse or simply had concepts I was too young to understand)


Strangely one of the books I was not allowed to read was LoTR. I have no idea why, perhaps he thought I was too young to appreciate it, or that it was too advanced for me at the age of 11 or twelve, but I know that had I read it at that age, I would have eaten it up with fervour, compared to now, some 16 or so years later and I have still not made it half way through Fellowship.

 

[kaneda]

Not really, although I wasn't allowed to read the diary of Adrian Mole age 13 3/4 until I was in my teens, and I wasn't allowed to read some magazines again, until I was in my teens.

Generally though, I was always encourages to read, and I was never into horror's or anything, so that was fine.

 

[mightymem]

Books were never banned in my household unless my parents found them and deemed them unsuitable, but i was never read much until i was a teen and then if i found a adult book which i liked i just never told them. mind you my parents were stricter on fillms. I remember reading a Steaphen king book which started off rather rude and when my parents found it they took it away.

 

[Alurny]

Although both parents devout christians, they were very pro allowing myself to make my own decisions. Something very rare in my families friendship circles, where my best friend only had the bible, wasn't allowed computer games etc.

I can't remember any limits really.

 

[Nada]

Never been really censored, for a while though, "guided": I was an avid reader already at 6 ir 7 and to "feed the monster" my parents (my mother actually) bought me a lot of classics, because they were books she loved.

I grew up devouring dickens, twain, verne, salgari and all the possible YA "classic" stuff. But then i discovered SFF... After age 10 or so my mother could not possibly keep up with my reading rithms and, still todays, she loathes SFF so she was not going to read in advance.

I remember a funny episode: I was 12 or 13 and I got one book of Jane Auel Ayla's cycle as a birthday present(those book have a LOT of very explicit sex scenes).
A few years later my mother discovered the serie and started to read it. After finishing the book she wondered with me (I was around 18 at the time) about all that sex scenes and the fact that i never said anything about them (i let her buy me the whole series)!


To the intrepid reader (and the busy parent) censorship is impossible.

 

[Rane Longfox]

Banned? Certainly not. Although if they knew some of the stuff I'd been reading they would probably have dissaproved. Meh.