Banned Book Spotlight: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

I first encountered this book when I was in the third grade and a boy in my class gave a book report on it. We all vaguely suspected him to have done it on a dare, since Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was obviously a "girly" book, and none of us could come up with any other respectable reason for him to have read it.

I don't actually remember how old I was when I read it for myself, but I do remember understanding when I had finished both why people got into such a fuss over it and why it was so important. The story revolves around the trials and travails of the life of ordinary twelve-year-old Margaret Simon. Well, almost ordinary. Unlike all her friends, Margaret has grown up without a religion; her mother is Christian, her father is Jewish, and since they can't come to an agreement of what to raise her, they decide to raise her as nothing at all and let her come to her own decision about what she believes.

On that level alone, this book was important to a young girl still trying to figure out questions of faith, but Blume's genius extends beyond Margaret's religious questioning and into the realm of her impending womanhood. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was the first fiction I ever read that dealt frankly with the social factors surrounding menstruation, and I only discovered one other book that touched on this topic during the length of my childhood (Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure, if anyone was wondering).

I had the fantastic opportunity to meet Judy Blume a few years back at a Book Expo America event, and tell her the story of how I came to read and love this book. She smiled when I told her about the boy in my third grade class who'd read it on a dare and said, "Well, I hope he learned something from it!"

Her books have been challenged pretty steadily throughout the years, and as such she's got some well-articulated opinions on censorship. To me, though, the following quote rings most incredibly true:

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."

Banned Book Spotlight: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In honor of Banned Books Week, which is held every year during the last moth of September by the American Library Association, I'm going to be writing a series of posts about my favorite banned or challenged books. To kick things off, I've got quite a bit to say about the best work of dystopian fiction I've ever read, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

I actually owe my first encounter with this book to the Disney Channel original TV series The Famous Jett Jackson. In one episode -- the only one I actually remember -- Jett's English teacher assigned Fahrenheit 451 to the class, only to be told that it was inappropriate reading for such young students (they were meant to be in middle school, perhaps high school). Jett and his friends fought back, and with the help of their teacher, they were able to keep Bradbury's text on the reading list and teach a valuable lesson about censorship at the same time. I was nine years old and in third grade at the time, but I was already a voracious and precocious reader, so I approached my father (who had been a high school English teacher, and possessed a collection of books my younger self intensely admired) to ask him whether we owned the book. He was probably a bit surprised, but he promised to look through his boxes for me and find out. When it turned out he didn't have a copy, he too me to the then-newly-constructed city library, where I sought out Fahrenheit 451 (with the help of a bemused children's librarian, who kindly walked me to the "grown-up" shelves and helped me find it), checked it out, and brought it home to read.

I worked through the book slowly, haltingly, certain that there was so much I wasn't "getting" but nonetheless feeling the telltale buildup of unease in the region of my stomach that Bradbury's most thought-provoking works continue to produce in me to this day. Of course, I was still a third-grader, and even for me Bradbury's style was intense. When it came time to decide between renewing the book or returning it to the library, I decided to return it, though I was perhaps only a third of the way through.

Fast-forward about five years. By the summer before my freshman year of high school, I had been transformed from a girl who'd read anything and everything with equanimity into a fledgling fan of science fiction and fantasy (thanks primarily to the influence of J. K. Rowling and Anne McCaffrey). I was excited about entering high school, finally being one of the "big kids," and decided that it was time for me to really sink my teeth into some serious reading to prove that I was ready for this. So again I appealed to my father's book collection, grown slightly less mystical over time, and when I found it lacking, I headed for the bookstore to acquire copies of the dystopian masterpieces I kept hearing about but had never read: Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.

I read them both within the span of a few weeks, and my world really hasn't been the same since.

Most American schoolchildren past junior high probably have some idea what Fahrenheit 451 is "about": state control of the media, censorship, and of course book-burning. And it is about those things, and they're some of the reasons why you should read it. But to me, the book has always suggested a more frightening and more general premise than even these labels can provide: What would become of a society without books? Bradbury at least seems to feel like a loss of literature would result in a loss of all those things we think of as most nobly human -- and whether it's due to the power of his writing or the truth of his convictions, I'm inclined to agree.

Over the years, I've realized that I'm incredibly lucky. When I was nine years old and asked my dad if he had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 lying around, he didn't tell me I couldn't read it. Knowing full well what it was and what it represented, he didn't reproach me for wanting to read it; neither did that saintly librarian. In fact, I can't remember any adult ever telling me that I couldn't read something. If anything, they were the ones who opened my eyes to the wealth of written material the world in store for me, and the best of them offered themselves up as guides through the maze of the literary world.

Not all children grow up like I did. Not all children can take their right to read for granted. Not all adults can take their right to read for granted: censorship affects people of all ages, and though in this country at this moment we're most aware of the books that parents try to keep their kids from reading, the historical precedents in the case of book-banning don't provide particularly sterling examples.

In Berlin, there is an open square called the Bebelplatz. In the center of the square, a small glass window in the ground lets observers peer into a room constructed underneath the surface of the square. The room is full of bookshelves. The bookshelves are all empty. At the edge of the square, the above plaques are set into the ground, each of them likewise the size of a paving stone. The quote by Heinrich Heine reads, "Where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people." As it turns out, the empty bookshelves beneath the square provide just enough space to hold all the books burned by Nazi sympathizers in this square; they are left empty in remembrance of the deeds this place has witnessed. The only thing I love better than this memorial is the living one that manifests just across the square in the form of the weekly university book market.

Why Math Matters to English Majors

For today's meeting of my English Senior Honors Thesis course, one of our assigned readings was by Ezra Pound, founder of a poetic school known as Imagism, and (in my opinion) a little crazy. T. S. Eliot famously dedicated The Waste Land to him and called him "the better craftsman" in the process, but my tastes have always leaned decidedly toward Eliot. However, this thesis course is really forcing me to think things through, and giving me a new appreciation for writers I might otherwise have dismissed, so I set out with at least some kind of willingness to give Pound a chance.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is that my professor -- affable, brilliant, possessing a PhD in English literature and a professorship at UC Berkeley -- wasn't initially able to decode one of Pound's arguments because he made it using a mathematical analogy.

Pound says:

…When one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a²+b²=c² applies to the ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a²+b²=c², but one has begun to talk about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into one’s matter. Until then one had dealt only with number. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.

We come to Descartestian or “analytical geometry.” Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers to these axes by a series of co-ordinates. Given the idiom, one is able actually to create.

Thus we learn that the equation (x-a)²+(y-b)²=r² governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject matter only. Art is more interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.

Now, when I was doing my reading, the last sentences of this quote thoroughly impressed me. Coming into this with no expectation of liking Pound, I actually found myself agreeing with his metaphor, and wishing I could talk it over with my old junior high math teacher!

But this section, which made the most sense to me, was the one that made the least sense to my professor, who claimed to have failed math the last time she took it. I and some other students in the class ended up explaining to her exactly how Pound's mathematical references supported his argument -- how "a²+b²=c²" describes a particular set of properties of a particular type of triangle, but "(x-a)²+(y-b)²=r²" actually defines the points on a coordinate plane that create the figure of a circle. If I were rewriting Pound, I might suggest that this is the difference between the terms "equation" (i.e. anything that has an equals sign in it, that expresses an equivalence) and "formula" (which I think of as a particularly significant equation, general enough to define or create the type it describes).

I felt a strange pride in the moment when my affable, brilliant English professor, after internalizing all the math, burst out with, "It's like a recipe for a circle! But the triangle one isn't a recipe! Oh, that's brilliant!"

I may have chosen to exist in a sphere upon which mathematics doesn't impinge very often, but that doesn't mean I'm mathematically illiterate. And it certainly doesn't mean that I think mathematics is inherently any more or less meaningful (or entertaining) than any other academic pursuits. I can be proud of the fact that I took two years of Calculus in high school, even if at the time I did it ostensibly because I wanted to avoid math in college, because the math that I've learned has genuinely changed the way I look at the world.

Sometimes, being at Berkeley and seeing the kinds of math that my friends are doing makes me feel like I'm never going to get past the tip of the iceberg as far as mathematics is concerned, and that therefore my math doesn't matter. Today helped me see otherwise. While I don't believe that I'll ever learn more math than I know now, and I certainly don't believe that my present math knowledge amounts to much, I do think there's something to be said for having taken the time to learn and internalize the math that I have encountered so far. Today, in what I am sure counts as an incredibly rare circumstance, it helped me understand a literary critic. Tomorrow it probably won't show up in any tangibly useful way -- but the more I learn, the more I come to believe in the importance of transgressing boundaries between subjects and disciplines in order to rejuvenate ideas, concepts, or formulations that seem to be growing stale. Today, math made English matter more than English could on its own, at least for me.

And so here I am doing the unthinkable and offering thanks to Ezra Pound, for answering the unspoken question of why I need math, and why it really was all worthwhile.

The Secret Life of Books

About three and a half years ago, I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and working my way through the final year of the International Baccalaureate degree. I was on the brink of college, thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and why, and utterly certain that, if nothing else, I loved books and the worlds that they opened for me, and I wanted to spend as much time around them (and around other people who thought this way about them) as I could.

Out of all the things I read for IB English, Jane Eyre is undoubtedly the one that has turned out to hold the greatest importance in my life — but second only to Jane Eyre is a slim, spare poem that had shown up on an IB English exam a few years back and was given to us as a practice text. It wasn't on our syllabus, we never really discussed it as a class, and we were supposed to give our copies of it back to the teacher once we’d finished with them.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because this poem reached out to me and didn’t let me go.

The Secret Life of Books

They have their stratagems too, though they can’t move.
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts.

What do they have to say and how do they say it?
In the library
At night, or the sun room with its one
Curled thriller by the window, something
Is going on,
You may suspect, that you don’t know of. Yet they

Need you. The time comes when you pick one up,
You who scoff
At determinism, the selfish gene.
Why this one? Look, already the blurb
Is drawing in
Some further text. The second paragraph

Calls for an atlas or a gazetteer;
That poem, spare
As a dead leaf’s skeleton, coaxes
Your lexicon. Through you they speak
As through the sexes
A script is passed that lovers never hear.

They have you. In the end they have written you,
By the intrusion
Of their account of the world, so when
You come to think, to tell, to do,
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.

Stephen Edgar, from Corrupted Treasures (1995)

Every time I read this poem, it makes me think in new and interesting ways about the relationships between books and their readers. Usually, every time I read it, I spend the first few stanzas feeling absolutely absorbed in the language used to describe the secret life of these books in question, the slim personification just enough for me to believe that they’re only alive when I’m not looking, or when I can just see them shuffle their covers out of the corner of my eye.

But by the time I make it to the final stanza, I start to develop this strange and disconcerting feeling in the region of my stomach. Because I am exactly the person “caught between / Quotation marks” in almost everything that I do, and far from it being accidental or unintentional (as the poet suggests this must be for most people) I do this all of the time on purpose. I use other peoples’ words when I can’t find my own. But then I start thinking: is this really true? Do I only quote when someone else has really said it better before, or do I sometimes let the quotations do my thinking for me, providing them as an educated response to a question or problem that I haven’t really managed to find a personal response to yet?

As a writer, this idea of being caught in constant quotation is even more of a chore: what does it say for the originality of anything I write creatively? I’ve often thought this is one of the largest problems I run into as someone who writes both creatively and analytically. Writing as an English major entails endless quotation, and values that quotation as the heart of the resulting text. My ideas about the text are important, but the text I produce in describing those ideas is often attributed back to the original text — even within my own writing, this happens. I may be clever to spot a pattern in Milton’s use of chiasmus or Austen’s depictions of reading, but the ultimate cleverness reverts back to Milton and Austen for embedding these things in their works in the first place (even if they have only done it unconsciously and I have excavated their meaning through conscious effort).

And then, when I’ve spent so much time with the words of others, exploring them, extracting them carefully from the text, coaxing them out inch by inch, and venerating them in the process, writing anything of my own seems not just silly but impossible. I have been written by all of the books I have ever read, so when it comes time for me to write books of my own, sometimes I’m afraid all I can do is re-write those books that have shaped me and hope no one notices the similarities.

Most of the time, I revel in my ability to quote my favorite texts, to carry them with me always. I think about the scene around the campfire at the end of Fahrenheit 451, with these men reciting literature against the darkness. But this poem makes me ask uncomfortable questions. It makes me think against the grain of the books that have written me over the years. Above all, it makes me reimagine that campfire circle: instead of these men preserving their past, they are stifling their future. Because isn’t it almost possible that by devoting themselves so wholly to the fictional creations of former ages, they are prevented from creating new (and possibly more relevant) fictions of their own?

Fiction is manipulative. This isn’t to say that it’s inherently good or bad, but it plays with my heartstrings and has the power to make me think ideas or do things or be someone that I wouldn’t have been without it. Sometimes, I forget that. Most of the time, I forget how ambivalent this power is. But this poem always reminds me.