Book Report: The Giver by Lois Lowry

When I was my son's age, my mom literally had to force me to go outside.  I wanted to stay inside and read.  She made me take my book and go outside on the steps to read.  I did that, and eventually started making friends with the neighborhood kids, and started playing street baseball, and Hide and seek, and basketball, and kill the kid with the ball, and all those fun street games.

I've been a very dedicated reader all my life, and when the book  The Giver by Lois Lowry came out in 1993, I was 29 years old, and I thought I was really into Young Adult Fiction.  Apparently not, though, as I missed it entirely, and I've since found I've missed hundreds of other books.  And this was a particularly bad miss, as it is a great book, and ended up winning The Newbery Medal in 1994.  It was also ranked in 2012 as the 4th best children's book of all time by Elizabeth Bird's Top 100 Chapter Book Poll.  (more books I've been meaning to read!)

(On an aside: It's a little bit of a fantasy that I'd like to make my 9-year-old child read only Newbery books.  I haven't even read them all (I just did a little count, and I've read 16 of the 412 books that have either won or been honored by the Newbery folks.  I better get cracking!).  Unfortunately, he's the kind of kid who loves his trash reading.



Don't get me wrong, I love that he reads, and through him I've read some really great stuff. He's read all of the Alex Rider novels, all of the Ranger's Apprentice novels, all of the I Funny novels, and all of the Harry Potter novels, as well as many others. Some of these he's read multiple times.  I have to force him to read new books, and when he does, he usually loves them.  I don't know if he's ready for Agatha Christie, but I get the feeling he is going to eat them up when he is.)



Some of the books my son loves.  (CLICK IMAGES TO SEE THEM ON AMAZON)







He's an inveterate reader, and for that I'm glad.  Even if he doesn't always read the books I want him to read (and it makes sense, seeing who his parents are. )  Right now he's refusing to read this next book, and when I do force him to read it  I'm sure he's going to love it!

SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD

Artwork inspired by The Giver. via Pinterest

Back to the Giver:  It's a utopian/dystopian novel, in which we follow a young boy named Jonas who lives in a Utopian society that celebrates equality and sameness... up to a point. The society is very ordered- at 8 you get a bicycle, at 10 you get your hair cut short, at 12 you receive your job- and when you are old enough you retire to the home for the Aged, until eventually you are Released.

Everybody turns age at the same time, and your peer group works together.  It's a polite society where apologies are mandated for even the tiniest infraction of the group. A group of Elders studies you and decides how you are best suited to help society in your job, and who your spouse should be, and eventually, when the people suited to be Birth Mothers deliver, who gets which child and what their name should be. It's a society that seems like it should be operating at peak efficiency.

But as you learn as you read further, things are not necessarily idyllic.  Boys and girls (and men and women) take pills every day to quell their "stirrings."  At a certain point, you realize that the Mother and the Father are not the biological mother and father.And when you get much further into the book, you realize that even the idea of color has been stripped away from the community's life.  Not color as in race, but as in color, red, green, blue, etc.  Whether this is done via drugs or via surgery is not necessarily clear.

As well, you realize that there are some other sinister elements.  There's a young baby who doesn't sleep well, and there's a fear that he might have to be "released."  At first it's unclear if "Released"  means sent to another community, but pretty quickly you get the foreboding idea that released is a euphemism for euthanized.  And the same with the elderly who get "released" as well.

It turns out there are sequels!
Check them out on Amazon

Our hero, Jonas, ends up being selected to be the Receiver of Memories, a special job that requires that he take in memories of the past times from the current Receiver, who is an old man. (And once Jonas becomes the Receiver, he becomes the Giver) Something happened 10 years before to the previous Receiver in Training.  And as Jonas starts to receive memories from the long past, he starts to realize that there's more to his society than meets the eye...

The book is so well written, and takes a simple idea and expands the hell out of it.  I love how there's a sense of foreboding from the first line, and we discover gradually things about this society without being told so much about them.  The version I read came with A Reader's Guide at the end, along with questions for discussion and an interview with the author.

Because of the dystopian element, this book has been on "The Challenged Book List" for a long time.

More excitingly, I just discovered that there are sequels!  She apparently wrote four books in this series.  (Although not exactly a quartet, there are four books set in this world, although they all follow different protagonists. ) Gathering Blue, The Messenger, and The Son Can't wait to read them!



There's also a 2014 movie! Featuring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep.  It didn't get great reviews, but I think it looks well worth seeing.  Except at the end of the trailer, the super high-tech flying machine seems a little too Hunger Games-ish.   Completely missed this one too! I now feel like I've been under a rock about this book.

Has your child read the Giver?  What did they think?  Please tell me in the comments below. I'm trying to build up a persuasive case to get my son to read it!

Banned Books Week

This display was in the lobby of the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library in Chicago.

It's Banned Books Week this week, which is a celebration of intellectual freedom and the freedom of the press.

Banned Book Week is sponsored by the ALA (American Library Association) and libraries all around the country are celebrating books that have either been "Challenged" or outright banned.  Challenged books are books that have been attempted to be removed or restricted by a group.

A hit list of banned and challenged
children's books. Available via Amazon.

The ALA has been standing up for Banned and Challenged Books for over 30 years!

The freedom to choose what we read (and what we write) is firmly rooted in the First Amendment. Would-be censors can come from all quarters and all political persuasions and threaten our right to choose knowledge and entertainment for ourselves.

Here's last year's list of challenged books. It's worth noting that each year hundreds of books are challenged, but only a small fraction of those books are ever in danger of being removed or restricted.  That's because librarians (and teachers, and parents, and students, and regular people) all stand up and fight for the ability of ideas and ideals to be shared.




One of the things that I think is really interesting is that sometimes these books aren't being challenged because of content, but because of context .  A great example is Bill Cosby, whose children's books and television shows were revered.  Serious allegations of sexual misconduct are now endangering his books, many of which had been written years before these allegations.  The books haven't changed, but our reaction to them has. (Or at least some people's reactions.  I think that what Bill Cosby did to those women was heinous, but his childhood was still pretty funny and great and has meaning to me, and has such his books still have merit.)

Some of the challenges have some merit, especially within a school or classroom setting.  As the father of a nine-year-old, I definitely think there are books that I don't want my son to be reading.  Mostly it's not for the ideas in them, but for the prurient content, the language, or the violence. None of them should be off-limits forever.  (A great question though, is knowing when he is ready to start reading some of the more controversial books. My personal feeling is that every kid is different, and managing their information/reading diet is something that parents have to tailor to their children.  Raising your kids is not the prerogative of the government but of you.  )

I don't remember which
book I was reading.
It kind of looked like this.
Available via Amazon.

SHORT PERSONAL ASIDE:

When I was in fourth grade, I started reading a lot of books about the Mafia and about Voodoo.  I was interested, I bought the books at the dime store, and I was a voracious reader. My teachers were quite concerned, apparently that I was planning on becoming a magical criminal.

Long story short, I was banned from reading those books.  At the time, I was furious, but over time, I found other books to read, and I have not lost my taste for true crime. Or books about forbidden subjects.

At the Sulzer Library, in honor of Banned Book Week, the teen program is putting together a zine. (For those of you not steeped in 1990's culture, a zine is a handmade magazine)    They were asking people to respond to the following prompts.  And then they are going to publish the zine.  Find out more about the Sulzer Teen Zine Club.

These are great questions, and worth answering.

WHAT BANNED OR CHALLENGED BOOKS HAVE YOU READ?
I have read many banned or challenged books, including Go Ask Alice, all of the Harry Potter books, Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Nighttime, The Joy of Sex, and many many others.  I would definitely recommend that people read books that interest them, regardless of whether other people think it's right.

WHAT WOULD YOU LOSE WITHOUT THE FREEDOM TO READ?
Knowledge, Power, History, and Entertainment.  For me, books open up new worlds, worlds that I haven't been a part of, could never be a part of, and they give me insight into them.  I think it was Franz Kafka who said "A book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Here's a great article from the National Post about just that (along with the Kafka quote)

WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE CHALLENGE BOOKS?
I would guess and say fear of the unknown is the primary reason.  As I've researched banned books for this article, many times, the people who are challenging the books are challenging them but they haven't read them.  They've read about them, and have concluded they are immoral, and therefore challenge them.  As stated above, I'm not against limiting books (or television, or videogames) for kids based on content, but I think it is the parent's job to do that, not the governments (or the libraries)


So what about you?  How would you answer these questions?  And how are you celebrating Banned Books Week?

Find out more about Banned Book week here: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks