James LaRue - myliblog

The past week, Oct. 5-11, was Banned Books Week. This event, the offshoot of a book expo in 1982, celebrates the Freedom to Read. It does so, paradoxically, by recounting the many ways people try to remove or restrict access to books, movies, magazines, databases, exhibits, programs and virtually anything else a library provides. The point of the First Amendment, and the deep purpose of the public library, is based on a simple idea. We have the right to speak and the right to access the speech of others. It used to be that these attempts to censor (by hiding or removing) ideas and books was just a small fraction of library use. Most of them were one-offs, usually parents upset that their children (often between the ages of 4-6 or 14-16) were growing up a little faster than the parents wanted them to. But since about 2021, book challenges tend to be coordinated by a few recurrent groups and cluster around a pre-identified set of books. Most of those books feature LGBTQ+ or people of col...

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I was a philosophy major in college. (Actually, I got a double major: philosophy and creative writing, with a minor in business law.) When I graduated my father asked me what I was now qualified to do. “Argue eloquently in bars,” I told him. And I have. But, in fact, philosophy is a wonderful tool to tackle almost anything. What I learned from my readings was that clear thinking comes down to three things. First, what are your premises? Can you identify them? Second, how reasonable are they? Is there evidence? How trustworthy is it? Third, can you get from those premises to a justifiable conclusion? Does the chain of your reasoning follow the rules of logic? In this, the Age of Misinformation, we see many people whose premises are not just made up but strongly contradicted by the data. Once the false problem is set up they offer a ludicrous solution. An example. Premise: “There is a burgeoning public health crisis of sexual crime and misbehavior!” Evidence: In fact, like violent crimes...

The Institute for Liberal Values  let me know that were reading my book On Censorship  for a book club. Then they invited me to join them. They livestreamed the conversation with host Elizabeth and Pam. You can find the Youtube video here  or see below.

Many thanks to reporter Gabriela Resto-Montero who told me she grew up at one of the Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries I used to administer. These days, she has her own young child, who colored over the cover of my book On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US . It looked pretty good! At our May 23, 2024 interview. Gabriela was thoughtful and well-prepared. As America's book banning efforts continue to grow, and to become for some reason the brand of at least one wing of today's Republican party, I appreciate the media giving time to consider just what it means to have the freedom to read. Here's the link .

Every year, apologists for the restriction of reading stumble over themselves to "mock" Banned Books Week. Walther (Oct 1, 2023's " The Enemies of Literature ") upholds the grand tradition. Complaints about banning, the argument goes, are simply false. Walther writes, "In zero cases since the advent of Banned Books Week has a local or state ordinance been passed in this country that forbids the sale or general possession of any of the books in question." Yet Texas HB 900 was passed on June 13 of this year. It requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based only on the presence of depictions or references to sex. If a book is "sexually explicit" and has no direct connection to required curriculum, it must be pulled from the school. (One wonders what happens to the Bible, and its story of Lot's daughters, first offered by their father for gang rape, and whom he later sleeps with.) In Arkansas, legislation stated that school and pu...

I am thrilled to report that my book, On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US is now available. Many thanks to the extraordinary folks of Fulcrum Publishing. At every step of the process, they have been insightful, constructive, and a pleasure to work with. I would like to call out, in particular, Sam Scinta, Alison Auch, and Kateri Kramer. Sam reached out to me at the beginning, Alison greatly improved my drafts, and Kateri has been invaluable in booking various speaking gigs since then. Maybe every author is like this, but now that it's out, all I can see are the things I got wrong. When you write something, you know what you meant, and totally overlook those spots where you mumbled or misstyped. Fulcrum editors caught most of the goofs, but I managed to slip a few past them. As many authors have noted before me, all the mistakes are mine. I'm also chagrined that some of my edits apparently remained in my drafts, and never got forwarded to Fulcrum...

[on behalf of the Colorado Association of Libraries Future Interest Group] In a recent Youtube presentation on the public good, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich cited a startling statistic. Public confidence that government did the right thing all or most of the time fell from 71% in 1963 to 16% in 2016. That was before Donald Trump became president. Pick an institution–the church, the Supreme Court, public schools, Congress, television news–and the general trend seems pretty clear. Confidence in institutions is falling across the board. There are outliers, but after reviewing this Gallup report , I can’t help but wonder how America’s libraries are doing. Today we’re witnessing the greatest surge of book challenges since the founding of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom in 1967. Some of these campaigns are certainly coordinated, but it’s not always clear by whom. These challenges aren’t just against particular titles or themes (although most of them focus on books by or abou...

A few weeks ago, it turns out, I had walking pneumonia. Then I was contacted by a journalist for the Deseret Magazine for some comments about the sharp rise of book challenges across the country. In response to one of his questions, I said something that bordered on incoherence. That happens sometimes when you're quoted. (Maybe it happens more often when you have pneumonia.) I don't blame the author, who doublechecked the recording. I blame me. I conflated two things I think into one mismash that I don't. So I wanted to clarify my comments. I was trying to speak about two kinds of challenges: the ones that try to reduce the real horror of slavery and racism portrayed in Beloved by Toni Morrison to nothing more than "too sexy," and the ones that paint the whole of another work, The Little House in the Prairie books, for instance, as being comprehensively racist, when that isn't the point of those works, either. In the end, most censorship challenges are redu...

When my daughter was 14 years old, she wrote a paper for school about an old controversy: complaints about the novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." It was so good, I persuaded her to submit it to the Colorado Libraries magazine -- and they accepted it. It came out in Fall, 2002, v 28 no3. Huck Finn is in the news again, most recently in Accomac VA, where, along with To Kill a Mockingbird , a parent is seeking to have the books entirely removed from a school. The incident reminded me of my daughter's essay - and I reprint it below because I think she nailed the issues. Maddy's essay, to me, is proof that of course minors should be allowed to read anything they can understand - and they understand plenty. They are certainly up to the challenge of reading American classics. ================= River Banks by Madeleine LaRue If you squint your eyes, and look real close, you might see that shape out there on the river. See it? It's just on the hori...

I'm sure I'll have many more thoughts over the next few days about my experience. But now that I'm back in the US, I'll say what I really didn't want to say while I was there: there is a strong and widespread sense that anti-American sentiments are rising, aided and abetted by Putin's administration, and somewhat to my surprise, by the Orthodox Church. Many of the questions I received by Russians were about censorship. My stories - about overprotective parents who wanted stories of woods without wolves (lest they frighten the children) - seemed almost naive to the Russians. While I was there, as recorded on the front page of the English language Moscow Times (November 30-December 2, 2012), "a city court declared Pussy Riot's 'punk prayer' video extremist, meaning that media outlets can face closure for publishing the all-female band's famous performance in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. Thursday's far-reaching decision als...

After another breakfast buffet (salmon caviar!), I met Peter and one of his other staff people in the lobby. We walked over through the second day of snow to the Russian State Library, just a couple of blocks away. There I met Yelena, my new interpreter. The Russian library is a huge couple of buildings behind the Dostoyevsky statue, and contains some 10 million or more items. I was introduced to several key directors of the library, then they took me up stairs to a very fancy board room, where about 30 librarians from the largest Moscow libraries wandered in to listen. A tech guy set me up with my slides (bless the little wearable jump drive). My talk to this group was mainly the 5 trends talk. Then I took questions, and segued a bit into the censorship talk. I begin to see why there's such an interest in this topic here. There is in fact a list of titles that are forbidden -- mostly related to terrorism. One of the librarians asked if we'd ever experienced this interesting ...

This new title, edited by Valerie Nye and Kathy Barco, was published by ALA, copyright 2012. It is available from several sources. The book is divided into various themes or "parts:" * Sometimes we're our own worst enemy: when library employees are censors; * How dare you recommend this book to a child: reading levels and sophisticated topics; * Not only boy scouts should be prepared: building strong policies; * When the tribe has spoken: working with Native American collections; * Conversation + Confrontation + Controversy = Combustion: vocal organization and publicly debated challenges; * Crime and punishment: when library patrons have committed a crime; and * Perhaps it is possible to judge a book by its cover: displays. The book concludes with discussion questions, a list of contributors, and a solid index. Disclosure: I wrote a chapter on "Uncle Bobby's Wedding." The collection includes stories from all types of libraries: public, a...