Since 2021 I’ve been reading Newbery award-winning books to my kids (ages 7 and 10) in the evenings, with the ambitious goal of reading all 100-plus. So far we’ve read 16; at the rate we are going I will still be reading to them when they come home from college for the holidays.
I started this Newbery journey for a number of reasons.
Because of how much these books meant to me as a child (especially The Island of the Blue Dolphins and A Wrinkle in Time and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH)
Because it simplified the book-selecting process
Because I love an audacious goal
Because these books, more than any others, started the best conversations
I’ve been jotting down notes and taking voice memos from our nighttime conversations. And in the back of my head I wondered, Could this ever be a book? I thought maybe in 8 or 10 years, as I approach an empty nest, I could write a sort of Boyhood-ish memoir of reading these beautiful books to my kids throughout the years, weaving in funny stories from our family and backstories from the authors, things like that. The idea was vague and uncooked and not the point of the project.
Meanwhile, in the years that my children and I have been cuddled up reading The Giver and The Higher Power of Lucky and, yes, my childhood faves like A Wrinkle in Time, the number of banned books has been ticking up, up, up in unprecedented numbers, not only in Florida (Christ, Florida) but all around the country. I had a sense that this was happening, but I didn’t start following the story in earnest until about a year ago, when I started hearing the names of books we had been reading—the ones I named in this paragraph—on those banned lists.
I was outraged. I was filled with purpose and spitfire. How could people ever keep The Giver from a child? What good would that ever do? How misguided, how awful, how terrible. What is this country coming to, and what could I do to help?
One morning it came to me: What if I challenged myself to write this book I had heretofore only vaguely envisioned? What if I wrote my Newbery book now, before we’ve gotten through one-fifth of our reading goal, and the book became about our experience reading banned books, to show people how important and life-changing these books really are? It would be about what the Newbery books meant to me as a child; what they mean to my kids now. It would examine the bans and try to answer the question: What is it about books with real ideas, about magic and loss and identity, what is it about books like that that scares people so much? I thought up a working title: Reading of Age.
I met Summer Boismier, the teacher from Oklahoma who covered up banned books in her classroom with signs that read, “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read.” She was fired, and she now works at the Brooklyn Public Library for the Books Unbanned initiative, which allows people from all over the country to check out banned books from the Brooklyn library online.
I emailed my librarian friend, Beth, who had started Thankful Thursdays at her Virginia high school library after hearing about my gratitude year, and whom I visited while writing chapter ten of my book. She wrote me back with some wonderful insights, and I wanted to talk to more librarians.
I joined the ALA; I befriended Jonda MacNair, a former chair of the Newbery awards who invited me to come to last year’s banquet celebrating the winners, including Amina Luqman-Dawson, author of the delightful Freewater, which my kids and I loved and which would almost certainly be banned in some districts.
So I flew to Chicago for the ALA conference and sat in on panel after panel about how librarians are coping with the bans, trying to keep up with the squishy laws and not get arrested. And I went to that Newbery banquet and listened to Luqman-Dawson’s beautiful speech, where she said, “I’ve been asked several times whether I worry about the impact of book banning on Freewater. I find it an interesting question. Part of the danger of this book-banning assault is that it skews and distorts discussion. A ban implies that our children’s lives have been awash in literature and learning about the banned topics, such as LGBTQIA+ and African American experiences (in my particular case) and the nation’s history of slavery. It tilts discussion away from our historical shortcomings and forces us to fight for the bare minimum, the right to exist—to merely have our books on a library shelf or in a classroom.”
My best friend from high school is a teacher in our hometown; she sent me a six-hour YouTube video of a local school board meeting that addressed the bid to ban Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See, a Newbery honor book. I watched all six hours.
I bought a corkboard and index cards and laid out the chapter structure, whereby each chapter would be anchored by a different Newbery book we read, and would start with the month and year we were reading that book, and how many books were banned in America at that time. The reader would watch as that number skyrocketed, unbeknownst to our little reading trio. And then once we became fully aware of the bans and how they were impacting the books we loved, I would go on a quest to answer my children’s innocent and wise questions about why these books are being taken away from children.
My quest would take me to Massachusetts to visit the (still-living!) Lois Lowry. (Dream big!) It would take me to a board meeting in my hometown in California and then to Northern California, where my fifth grade teacher lives. I would fly to Oklahoma, to Florida. I would interview readers and authors and librarians and teachers and, yes, even some of the Moms for Liberty, the ones to blame for so many of these book bans.
I would befriend one of these liberty-loving moms and show her that we have more in common than she might have thought. That we both love our children and want to protect them, but we have different ideas for how to do that. I would ask what books she loves to read to her children.
There was so much to say. This topic was “yeasty,” as one teacher told me at the Chicago conference. I was high off the dopamine of my own good idea.
And then I felt the wind slowly come out of my sails. I couldn’t understand why at first. Something about the project started feeling forced, and I couldn’t articulate the reason.
It became clear to me while I was eating falafel. I was sitting with Rachel Bergstein; a mutual friend had connected us. Rachelle is writing a book about Judy Blume and has a Substack about book bans. She said to me: “It’s not about the books.”
As she said that, I remembered watching the wonderful Judy Blume documentary, in which Blume is shown engaging with Republican pundits in the 80s over content in her books that had gotten them banned. There was no point in having this conversation, Blume realized at some point. It was futile.
And that’s when I got it. The banned books are pawns in our curdled culture war. It was the same thing in the 80s. It feels foolish, an exercise in futility, for me to pick up an argument in earnest that is, at its core, so false. I think this is what Luqman-Dawson is saying in her speech. The book bans are a ruse, a distraction.
Have you seen any of the banned book forms people fill out, like this one that bans an Amanda Gorman book in a Florida district? The author is listed as Oprah Winfrey. These people, with their fire and brimstones and prayer books and pearls, haven’t read the books. This isn’t about the books. I wish it were. I think I could win that argument.
Fighting the book bans is still important work, and I salute RuPaul and LeVar Burton and everyone else fighting this fight.
But me, I’m back to reading to my kids at night for the fun of it. We were so into the Newbery winner The One and Only Ivan that we are reading the sequel, The One and Only Bob. I might remember to take a few notes or press record on my voice memo app. Who knows, maybe one day I will write that book, Reading of Age, about this time we are sharing together, when it’s just us and the words and the ideas they bring up, when the kids allow me the privilege of reading to them.
What do you think? Did I give up too easy? Tell me in the comments; I’d love to hear.
xo
G
Oh, Gina, so much in my heart and too much to say, but let me at least say thank you...thank you for reading to your children...thank you for loving the Newbery books as I have...thank you for caring enough to immerse yourself in the book banning stuff so you could make sure you were coming from a place of understanding and not ignorance. And thank you for getting to a wise stopping place and sharing your reasons -- of realizing what efforts move the needle and which ones are futile. I think you're absolutely right. Your righteous anger and energy are best expended elsewhere.
And let me tell you a quick story to illustrate why reading to your children is so important. My son got his PhD in computational and applied mathematics and then went on to do a fellowship during which time he wrote and published a text book on Isogeometric Analysis from his doctoral work. The chair of his department told him he was the best writer he had ever had among his math students. When I asked our son to what he attributed this, I thought he was going to credit his AP English teacher, but instead he said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Mom, it was because you always read to us. Even before I needed to know how to write, I knew what good words and sentences were supposed to sound like."
Reading to your children is one of the best gifts you can give them.
Hi Gina. Love this blog post! Newberry Award books are the gold standard for me. I loved "Out of the Dust" Please reach out to me! I may have an opportunity for you at one of our conferences.