Good.

I meant to post this piece I created for The Boston Globe during Banned Books Week but got busy and missed it. Then again, every week should be Banned Books Week, so here you go:

BIPOC Bookstore Feature: Freedom to Read

Meet our Summer BIPOC Bookstore feature: Freedom to Read, a Native-led program of Red Media based in Tiwa Territory (Albuquerque, NM). It aims to alleviate the financial and societal obstacles that create book scarcity in and around Indigenous communities. Support their program by purchasing books for their wish list at Massive Bookshop! Q: We're so excited to learn about Freedom to Read! Can you tell us a little bit about who your program serves, and how your partnership with Massive Bookshop works? How does Freedom to Read fit into your work with Red Media?

A: Thank you for featuring Freedom to Read! With Freedom to Read, we seek to alleviate some social and financial barriers that create book scarcity by offering free books. We prioritize Native people, but we also supply free books to community spaces wanting to highlight Native politics and history. Monetary donations go towards purchasing requested titles through Massive Bookshop. Additionally, Massive Bookshop helped us set up a book wish list on their website, where people can donate a book at a discounted price for Freedom to Read to distribute. The book wish list is a nice visual of which books Native people are requesting, and offers a vehicle of support. It’s genuinely steeped in solidarity. Q: Your program creates literary access for incarcerated Native community members, as well as libraries and schools. Have you heard back from any readers about their experience receiving books from your program? Are your participants able to make requests for your booklist?

A: Honestly, we’ve been a bit slow getting books to incarcerated people because it’s something we want to get right, and Freedom to Read is still relatively young, so we want to have more developed principles. At the moment we rely on knowledgeable people for guidance to point us toward those with a solid structure for book distribution inside prisons.

In 2022, we received a letter from an incarcerated Native person expressing their thoughts and gratitude about two books we donated, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, which Noname Book Club distributed. It was such a pivotal moment indicating that these books are needed. Earlier this year, we donated books to the Nambe Pueblo Tewa Language Department, and they sent us a card thanking us for providing culturally relevant resources. It was so rewarding to know that others can experience joy from a program like this, and it’s reciprocal. 

We are currently trying different approaches, figuring out what works, and people are still learning about Freedom to Read. Next year, we aim to open communication for people to request books for themselves or their relatives. Q: Your book list spans titles from children's picture books, to poetry, academic texts, and more. How did you staff select these titles in particular?

There have been very few instances where I’ll add a book I think is essential for people to read. Still, for the most part, all of the books we have on our wish list have been requested or recommended by librarians, workers, relatives, professors, and organizers wanting politics, history, and stories by Native authors and authors from oppressed communities in their space. Our booklist is carefully curated and adjusted to meet the needs of the people.

“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia. What are we doing?”

The "secret shelf" of banned books at a Texas high school. Texas is like a communist country where citizens need to find covert ways to read books which the state doesn't want them to see.

In the far, far suburbs of Houston, Texas, three teenagers are talking at a coffee shop about a clandestine bookshelf in their public school classroom. It's filled with books that have been challenged or banned. "Some of the books that I've read are books like Hood Feminism, The Poet X, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces," says one of the girls. She's a 17-year-old senior with round glasses and long braids. The books, she says, sparked her feminist consciousness. "I just see, especially in my community, a lot of women being talked down upon and those books [were] really nice to read." These students live in a state that has banned more books than nearly any other, according to PEN America. The Texas State Board of Education passed a policy in late 2023 prohibiting what it calls "sexually explicit, pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable books in public schools." Over the past two years, Texas teachers have lost jobs or been pressured to resign after making challenged books available to students. The teacher who created this bookshelf could become a target for far right-wing groups. That's why NPR is not naming her, nor her students.

Yeah, gotta watch out for Texas brownshirts in cowboy hats who yell and threaten people at school board meetings.

"We don't want to jeopardize our teacher in any way, or the bookshelf," another teenager explains. Until recently, he says, he was not naturally inclined toward reading. But the secret bookshelf opened a world of characters and situations he immediately related to. "Just to see Latinos, like LGBTQ," he says. "That's not something you really see in our community, or it's not very well represented at all." The secret bookshelf began in late 2021, when then-state Rep. Matt Krause sent public schools a list of 850 books he wanted banned from schools. They might, he said, "make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex." That made this teacher furious. "The books that make you uncomfortable are the books that make you think," she told NPR. "Isn't that what school is supposed to do? It's supposed to make you think?" She swung into action, calling friends to support a bookshelf that would include all of the books Krause wanted banned. Then she enlisted a student to put it together. "I went through the list and found the ones that I thought were cool," he recalled to NPR over a London Fog latte. "And then she gave me her [credit] card and I bought them. It was a lot of gay books, I remember that."

That same student came out as trans to his family while in high school. "I wouldn't call them supportive, so I had to do a lot of sneaking around," he said quietly. Now 19, he's graduated and works as a host in a restaurant while deciding on his next move. "Having these books, having these stories out there meant a lot to me, because I felt seen," he said. Especially meaningful, he added, during a fraught time when Texas lawmakers banned transition-related care for teenagers. "Because of the way the laws are going for trans people especially," he said, "it could be assumed that [my teacher is] grooming kids. And that would be terrible because that's not what she's doing at all."

Kudos to the teacher and students who are maintaining this mini-library!

Because most of the HS seniors will be turning 18 this year, I hope the secret shelf adds information on voter registration. A minimum of 99% of the book banners are Republicans. And the only way to get rid of Republicans is to vote Democratic. Contrast Republican Texas with Democratic Illinois which has banned book banning.

Law prohibiting book bans in Illinois now in effect

Illinois is known as the Land of Lincoln. Abe Lincoln had less than two years of formal education but he became a voracious reader. He would be shocked and disappointed that his old party has degenerated into a mob of book banners and book burners.

I think we all agree on what media is for: It’s for reinforcing our worldviews via simple morality tales portrayed with as little ambiguity as possible and hopefully a couple explosions just to keep it from being boring. What media is not for is teaching us anything new, or exposing us to novel forms of thought, or showing us how it is to live as a different type of person. And you know why it’s not for that? Because of the children.

Won’t you think of the children? What if they see something that they, literal children, don’t immediately understand? What if any aspect of our cultural stories isn’t instantly graspable by actual children? How would I explain that to them? By sitting down? In the same room as them? And talking to them about it? Ugh. No. Ugh.

It’s just better and easier if we make all of our media only fit what a five-year-old child who has never been exposed to anything outside of his immediate neighborhood will understand instantly and without further explanation. It’s called decency. Look it up. In a dictionary. Which is a book full of words I don’t understand and refuse to learn.

This has been Cecil’s Media Corner

— Welcome to Night Vale 200 - Susan Willman Comes Clean

"Among the Right to Read Act provisions:

Up to $500 million in Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grants

An increase in the Innovative Approaches to Literacy Program to $100 million

A concerted investment in the recruitment, training, and retaining of certified school librarians

Reaffirming student First Amendment Rights to access school library materials, with expanded liability protection for teachers and school librarians."

Text of the Senate bill is here, and the House bill is here.

Contact your legislator and tell them to vote YES on these bills. Do it today.

Airlifting Banned Books to Florida

I feel constitutionally and morally required to promote this website, BannedBooksUSA.org. They are mailing any banned book to anyone, anywhere in Florida for only the cost of shipping. On top of that, my favorite online source for physical books, Bookshop.org (the antidote to Amazon) is doing the fulfillment.

LGBTQIA+ Pride Month: More Fiction Recommendations

My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind.

In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.

Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

"Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good."

For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US.

Less roves across the "Mild Mild West," through the South and to his mid-Atlantic birthplace, with an ever-changing posse of writerly characters and his trusty duo - a human-like black pug, Dolly, and a rusty camper van nicknamed Rosina. He grows a handlebar mustache, ditches his signature gray suit, and disguises himself in the bolero-and-cowboy-hat costume of a true "Unitedstatesian"... with varying levels of success, as he continues to be mistaken for either a Dutchman, the wrong writer, or, worst of all, a "bad gay."

We cannot, however, escape ourselves--even across deserts, bayous, and coastlines. From his estranged father and strained relationship with Freddy, to the reckoning he experiences in confronting his privilege, Arthur Less must eventually face his personal demons.

This is the second volume in the “Arthur Less” series. 

Rosewater by Liv Little

Elsie is a sexy, funny, and fiercely independent woman in south London. But several things in her life have gone terribly wrong. She's estranged from her family; is failing to make it as a poet; and has just been evicted from her social housing. As fierce and independent as she is, even Elsie must admit that being a carefree 28-year-old is proving difficult--and that she's running out of options.

Juliet, her best friend since childhood, has always been Elsie's lifeline. So even though they haven't spoken in months, Elsie is soon snuggled up on Juliet's couch, back at home among the mismatched cushions and knit blankets.

Between their reruns of Drag Race and nights smoking on the balcony, something surprising begins to glimmer in Elsie's heart. And as the days turn into weeks and then months, this feeling quickly becomes too fierce to ignore. Will Elsie be brave enough to open herself up to love?

The Fake by Zoe Whittall

After the death of her wife, Shelby is suffering from prolonged grief. She’s increasingly isolated, irritated by her family’s stoicism and her friends’ reliance on the toxic positivity of self-help culture. Then, in a grief support group, she meets Cammie, who gives her permission to express her most hopeless, hideous feelings. Cammie is charismatic and unlike anyone Shelby has ever met. She’s also recovering from cancer and going through several other calamities. Shelby puts all her energy into helping Cammie thrive—until her intuition tells her that something isn’t right.

Gibson is fresh from divorce, almost forty, and deeply depressed. Then he falls in love with Cammie. Not only is he having the best sex of his life with a woman so attractive he’s stunned she even glanced his way, he feels truly known for the first time in his life. But Gibson’s friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he, too, has to admit that all the drama in Cammie’s life can feel a bit over the top.

When Gibson and Shelby meet, they realize Cammie’s stories don’t always add up. In fact, they’re far from the truth. But what kind of a person would lie about having cancer? And what does it say about Shelby and Gibson that they fell for it?

Here’s your reminder that today is the #RightToReadDay. However, our threat to democracy is everyday, and it’s up to us to uphold our freedom to read!

“We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

“Dear Reader,

Thank you for your kind words about my work. May I make the elementary point that the freedom to write is closely related to the freedom to read, and not have your reading selected, vetted and censored for you by any priesthood or Outraged Community?

Since when was a work of art defined by the people who didn’t like it? The value of art lies in the love it engenders, not the hatred. It’s love that makes books last. Please keep reading.”

-- Salman Rushdie, “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”