The question that popped up on Facebook with an assortment of banned books brought back a memory first and a curiosity later. The question asked, “Why was A Light in the Attic banned?”
My memory involved the stress of the mother of one of my second-graders as she worried about her reluctant reader. Chris, as we shall call him, could read perfectly well. Reading was just never his chosen activity. I repeated the mantra to her that he had just not found the right book yet and urged her to be patient. I assumed that one of the variety of books that I read aloud to my students would light his fire. Along about the middle of November, this mother came in bursting with excitement. “You’ll never guess what Chris put at the top of his Christmas list in his Santa letter.” He wants A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I, too, was surprised. I read a poem every morning to start the day with the class, frequently using Shel Silverstein’s books for their humorous second-grade appeal. I had expected Chris to love a book I read and want the next one in the series or another by the same author. I hadn’t given any thought to my poem books.
Needless to say, Chris must have been a good kid since Santa brought both books to him for Christmas. For the rest of the year, he frequently pulled his copy from his desk and followed along as I read or pulled it out for free time when his work was finished.
My curiosity about why A Light in the Attic was banned took me to my she-shed to get my copy. You can see the paper clips still marking favorites. I took a trip back through the book and smiled again at Shel’s preposterous ideas. If readers could entice their minds to get really narrow, they might take offense at one bit of mild bathroom humor (really funny!) or a couple of sketches in rough pen-and-ink. That kind of narrowing would take real effort. I’m not too worried, though. Banned books only seem to entice readers, and there may be more Chrises out there who need to find the book that lights their fire.