A genuinely Grimm concern

Four times between third grade and sixth, the authorities at my niece Erin’s school hauled her and her parents to the principal’s office due to her subversive behavior.

Her offense? Excessive reading.

The same school district that tried to tamp down on her love of literature by restricting her access to the books she loved is celebrating the perfect score in reading she received this year on her ACTs.

Erin’s passion for reading has introduced her to magical worlds and interesting people. It has allowed her to explore challenging issues in a safe space and, when her space wasn’t as safe as her parents would like – such as the time she and her friends witnessed a shooting in a park near their house – the stories she read gave her a healthy outlet to work through her fear.

Our tiny, voracious reader has grown into a strong and thoughtful young woman who is a fierce debater, a talented rock climber and a good friend.

Recently, she challenged herself to read 100 books in a year, and the busy high school senior had no problem completing that goal. Fortunately, Erin’s parents had both the means and the motivation to support her reading habit.

Not every child can say the same.

That’s why book banning bothers me so much. It allows a small group of frightened adults to block access to critical resources from some of the very children who need it most.

This spring, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill that bans books with “any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

So vague is this definition that districts in Iowa, home to Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, have been pulling classics. According to the Des Moines Register, school districts in Iowa are yanking “A Farewell to Arms,” by Ernest Hemingway, “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker, “Sophie’s Choice,” by William Styron, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” by James Baldwin, “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley and “Ulysses,” by James Joyce from their library shelves.

This is ridiculous and it’s dangerous and this weird fear of literature is spreading. 

Tonight, my sister Kathy, a retired library media specialist, will be attending a Menonomee Falls school board meeting to protest the district’s decision to pull 33 more books from their shelves. 

I wonder if this frantic yanking of books is in an attempt to prevent a recurrence of that sad epidemic of old women pushing children into ovens that happened in 1812 following the publication of Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretl.”

Except, of course, that never happened. Of course it didn’t.

I’m worried this book banning binge is going to draw kids away from thinning bookshelves and deeper into their social media echo chambers, and we’re going to raise generations of people who never learned the necessary art of critical thinking.

That’s a genuinely Grimm concern.