Inappropriate parts: Gr8 book. Spinoff Harry Potter thread

PinkFridge

Fri, Mar 27 2015, 8:37 am

ora_43 wrote:

I can understand a certain amount of marking out. But taking historic events out of history, less so.

It's like, I can see taking the kissing scenes out of Harry Potter, but if someone wanted to take out all the parts about magic, I'd find it... surprising.

Surprising, yes. I'd just say, don't bother with the book. If you want to expose the kids to writing on the level of JKR, I'd say find another book.

Fox

Fri, Mar 27 2015, 12:09 pm

I'll throw another observation out for discussion -- again, somewhat anecdotal.

I've noticed that there are readers and non-readers in the world. When I was younger and more stupid, I tended to assume that readers -- those of us who will read cereal boxes while eating breakfast if we don't have a book on hand -- are smarter or at least more intellectually inclined than those who read only occasionally or when they have to.

But here's my observation about censorship: the people most likely to do it are non-readers. To them, it's a no-brainer: why even risk allowing your child to read something inappropriate? After all, it's just some book.

Avid readers, though, tend to have a reverence for books -- even lousy books -- that makes them skittish about marking out passages or excluding entire works. We squirm at the notion even when we can't entirely articulate why.

I think it probably has to do with the fact that, for readers, censoring/excluding books seems like the equivalent of exiling us to a very small island. We instinctively recoil at the idea of limiting our ability to enter new worlds via books.

amother

Mustard

Fri, Mar 27 2015, 12:25 pm

Fox, that was an interesting observation.

As an avid reader myself, I view it differently. Rather than deprive my kids of the less than appropriate books, I'd tweak it to meet my standards so they can be exposed to the marvelous world of reading I love.

Also, another aspect of this is that our reverence for books makes us acutely aware of their power, and we ask ourselves if we want specific books gaining that kind of power over our innocent children...

gp2.0

Fri, Mar 27 2015, 12:40 pm

The only thing censoring accomplishes is increasing curiosity in the word or subject that was censored.

That's how my whole 9th grade class learned what the word "rape" means.

Side note: it's fun to reread the literature we read at school and see what was censored. Most of the time it's so innocent it's laughable.

I agree with Fox that some of us have a reverence for books and it feels like an affront, seems almost sacrilegious, to pick up a sharpie and attack one our prized possessions.

Anyway it's been proven over and over that censoring doesn't work. So it's pretty much a waste of time.

Fox

Fri, Mar 27 2015, 12:40 pm

amother wrote:

As an avid reader myself, I view it differently. Rather than deprive my kids of the less than appropriate books, I'd tweak it to meet my standards so they can be exposed to the marvelous world of reading I love.

That's definitely true, and that's what I found myself doing when I read to my kids years ago.

Of course, technology is putting an interesting twist on all of this: outside of my DH's seforim, I think I own a total of maybe six hard-copy books. Everything else is on Kindle. And I don't even own a Kindle device anymore -- I read everything on my Android phone.

My kids (the readers among them) do the same.

When they were a bit younger, they had to download everything through my Amazon account, so I knew exactly what they were reading at any given time. In fact, the lazier ones still do this.

But there is nice market for edited ebooks -- you can delete all those well-turned ankles without the heavy-handedness of a Sharpie, and you could matter-of-factly (and for legal reasons) indicate that this was an edited edition.

In fact, I recall reading that David Sedaris does this with a number of his essays -- he creates a "high school version" that can be included in texts, etc. So in effect, he gets paid twice for the same essay. The only real limit for living authors is how much artistic value they place on their original works, and I suspect for the right price, Hugh could be transformed quickly into Henrietta or Honoria.