The materials that have been publicly challenged since last year’s Banned Books Week haven’t all involved passing laws or pulling books from the shelves (although there have been some pretty dramatic incidents) Many of the challenges have involved unfairness (or perceived unfairness). A recent incident involved students at Duke University who publicly refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, an optional title on their summer reading list, stating that it was for moral reasons— it went against their religious beliefs. There are a lot of students who skip out of optional (and even required) reading, for a variety of reasons, but most of them aren’t writing about its immorality for the Washington Post. In the science fiction community, there was a lot of drama over the activities of the Sad Puppies, a group of writers who felt that traditional science fiction was being overwhelmed by diversity in both writers and writing, and challenged that by attempting to significantly influence the likelihood of winning a Hugo Award in favor of their own chosen candidates, with outrage on both sides (they failed). Another challenge involved a student at Crafton Hills College, who demonstrated outside the school along with her parents and friends when required to read Persepolis, Fun Home, Sandman Vol. 2, and Y: The Last Man Vol. 1 for an English class on graphic novels she had chosen out of fourteen options that would satisfy her graduation requirement. These three incidents all boil down to “I don’t want to read something new and different”.  But even if it’s not your own perspective, a willingness to be open to other perspectives, to listen to voices that aren’t your own, is important, because most people won’t always live in a world where everyone is just like them (except maybe the Stepford Wives). As Jessica Woodbury at BookRiot aptly puts it, “life is uncomfortable”.

I don’t often share it, but I follow censorship news outside the United States, too. And there are countries where the government really, truly, is a threat to freedom of expression. Internet access is extremely limited, there is no free press. People are fined, fired, expelled from the country, imprisoned, kidnapped, and even killed for their writing. In this interview with the exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, he talks about how the editorial board of a magazine that published chapters from his book was punished. And writing doesn’t have to be deliberately political to attract the government’s negative attention. It is a luxury to be able to say “this makes me uncomfortable, I don’t want to read it”, and as Banned Books Week comes to an end, let’s celebrate that it is something that, in this country, we can recognize publicly at all. So to those who object to reading anything that’s not exactly in line with life as they know it, I ask that you try something new. You have the option to stretch your mind and see what’s beyond your own nose… and you ought to know.