To Kill a Mockingbird rises
to top 100 despite book bans
to top 100 despite book bans
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
As more and more schools in the United States and Canada are dropping To Kill a Mockingbird from their curriculum (or outright banning it from their libraries), I was glad to see that such negative publicity has put my favourite novel on the top 100 list of bestselling books with Amazon.com:
"To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most frequently challenged books in the US," explains Carnegie Mellon University, "due to its themes of rape and use of profanity and racial slurs."
The novel plainly opposes rape, foul language and racism. Attacking the book for these reasons is doubly ironic when you consider the mockingbird analogy the story depicts: One of a innocent black man being sentenced to death for the rape of a lying white woman.
As Harper Lee once wrote in a letter:
Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of double-think. I feel, however, that
the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism.
Lee wrote those words in 1966, to a school board that took the book off their library shelf. Fifty-six years later we are fighting the same battle for common sense.
—John
PS While they are banning To Kill a Mockingbird from schools, I'm happy to say Much Ado About Corona has been appearing in libraries across Canada and the United States. If you want to have it added to your library, head over here for instructions.
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
