No 23: Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

When I was a teenager, my mom was convinced that any song lyric she didn't understand was a reference to drugs. We'd be riding along in the car with the radio playing and mom would turn to my sister and me and say "That's slang for cocaine." My sister and I were all "How on earth do you know that?" and she would nod gravely and say "I just do." Now, my mom is not some drug-using hippie. She's a straight arrow, school teaching, christian, ex-military wife who has never even taken more than the prescribed dosage of an advil. Turns out that she was right about at least one song I remember. I can find no logical reason for my mom's accurate knowledge of drug slang and am therefore assuming that she picked it up from Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (aka Beatrice Sparks).

First published in 1971, Go Ask Alice shows up at number 23 on the ALA's List of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books. The title is a reference to that horrible Jefferson Airplane song, White Rabbit, which everyone but me seems to love. It is presented as the diary of an actual (anonymous) 15-year old girl who accidentally takes LSD, and begins a descent into the world of drugs, runaways, rape, violence, sex, and sex for drugs (which I think we can all agree is a different category of sex altogether).

Gentle Readers, do I even need to go into why this book is banned? That's what I thought.

There is another controversy altogether surrounding this book (which seems interestingly not to have impacted its banning one way or the other) and that is its veracity as a diary. Go Ask Alice written by an actual, real life, walking, talking, high school attending 15-year old girl? Yeah... not so much. I mean seriously, the book goes into pages of detail about her first drug trip (where she understood Adam & Eve's secret language) and then spends less than two paragraphs talking about a boy she likes. Does that sound like any 15-year old girl you know? Me neither.

Still, I felt sorry for the (made-up) teenage girl. She repeatedly tries to get off drugs only to be left lonely as the druggies torment her and the straight kids want nothing to do with her. "Lonely" and "teenager" are not a good combination.

Instead of banning this book, it would be great to use it as a jumpstarter for a conversation with teenagers about drugs. Granted, it's fairly dramatic (and possibly overblown) but also a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when bad drugs happen to nice kids.

No. 13: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Gentle Readers, I think it's time I tell you about my first crush. (Pretend like the music from Summer Place is swelling in the background. It makes the story better.) His name was Brian and we went to first grade together. I don't remember much about him except for the time he let me lift his lunchbox and it was really heavy. Then he moved away and I never saw him again. OK... it's not as good a story as I thought. Instead, let's talk about my first literary crush. His name was Holden Caulfield and he was just tortured. I knew if I could only meet him, he'd see that I wasn't a phony and I could save him from himself.

Holden, as I'm sure you know unless you've been living under a rock since birth, is the main character from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, first published in 1951 and making foolish girls swoon ever since. If Holden were a real boy, he'd have black eyes, not just from getting beaten up by a bellman, but also from all the times he's been banned. The main reasons for the book's censorship are profanity (shocker! Holden = potty mouth), immorality and inappropriate sexual situations (among other things, Holden hires a hooker but is too angst filled to do anything with her), homosexuality (Holden's male teacher likes him a little too much) and (my favorite!) promotion of communism. The communism claim is a little vague but in 1978, parents in Washington state claimed that Holden's rebelliousness was part of a communist attempt to gain a foothold in American schools (or something).* Honestly, I think some people just don't get Holden.

Now that I'm older, I kind of see why. Holden can be a bit of a drag. When a teenage boy is too sad to have sex with a hooker, something is definitely wrong with the poor kid. Since we've already discussed how bad puberty sucks, I'll leave it alone. To his critics I say Holden is not beyond redemption, and point to his love for his sister Phoebe as proof. When I think about Holden now, I like to think that he got that job catching kids in the rye.

One last personal note to Billy Collins, I'm not the girl who left egg salad stains in his Marginalia, but I wish I was.

* To read more about this enticing ban, check out 100 Banned Books by Karolides, Bald, & Sova.

No 67: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Slaughterhouse Five appears at number 67 of the American Library Association's list of Most Challenged Books (1990-2000) and holds a special place in my heart. It was assigned summer reading by Miami University (college old and grand) for all entering students my freshman year. I thought it was strange and wonderful. I was, of course, right.

Slaughterhouse Five has been the subject of MANY attempts at censorship since its publication in 1969. In fact, Slaughterhouse was challenged all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1982, (Island Trees School District v. Pico). In case you’re wondering, the Supreme Court upheld the right of students to read it and teachers to teach it. Its critics have called it "dangerous" because of violent, irreverent, profane, sexually explicit and anti-American content.

I could break each of those criticisms down one by one but that might be boring. Here’s the gist of it... Slaughterhouse is set during WWII. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is an American POW who survives the bombing of Dresden. That it doesn’t shy away from describing the civilian casualties of the attack (read: Americans who are supposed to be the good guys attacking a city and killing innocent people) has made its critics cranky for years. Toss in Vonnegut’s general irreverence, Sci-Fi themes, swearing soldiers, sex, and bashing of free will and you get a lot of pissed off people.

What can I say? Vonnegut is not for everyone but if you like your reading thought provoking and irreverent, you should check it out. It's worth noting that Slaughterhouse is one of the first literary acknowledgments that the Nazi Holocaust also targeted homosexual men.