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Welcome to Freedom to Read Week, February 18-24. If you live anywhere in Canada, you may be able to find an event you'd enjoy here:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/events/?syclid=cn9rscj7v77s739m300g&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_129722318918&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

If you're in Ontario, it's Family Day and all public libraries and schools are closed. If you're in the Ottawa area, it's the final day of Winterlude and the Rideau Canal is actually open, as is the community rink around the corner from us.

Over the past year, I've been reasonably content with the (lack of) decisions to ban books. The Ottawa Public Library received 7 "requests for reconsideration" of books on their shelves and acceded to none of them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-public-library-book-challenges-tintin-stegosaure-1.7109676?cmp=rss

In Alberta, some public library materials relating to LGBTQ+ issues were returned damaged or vandalized, but I guess the good news is that the libraries did have those items available for loan in the first place, and police were called in.

The policies in school libraries (at least the ones I've heard about) are a little less progressive. But I was cheered by this article in a Brandon, Manitoba paper in which candidates in the fall 2023 provincial election were asked about their position on censorship:

https://www.brandonsun.com/local/2023/10/19/candidates-speak-against-book-bans-at-bsd-forum

The election resulted in a change of government, a shift to the left.

I'll conclude this entry with a link to an article on recently challenged books in Canadian libraries:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/articles/rising-tide-of-censorship-recent-challenges-in-canadian-libraries/

As many of us are aware, February is Black History Month. I suspect somewhat fewer of us are aware that February 20-26 is Freedom to Read Week in Canada:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/

So I'd like to devote this entry to some of the relevant reading I've been doing lately.

First up, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard Law School, himself black, and he provides a far more thorough, well-documented and nuanced study of the use of the N-word, in various contexts, than anything I had read up to now. It was written in 2002, with an introduction and afterword added for the paperback edition in 2003. So before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd but still, to me, a modern-day perspective. Unfortunately, Kennedy's study is limited to the U.S. context although of course much of it is applicable elsewhere.

Next up, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which features the word "nigger" every few pages. It's hard to imagine how one could eliminate that word from the book, or substitute another word deemed less offensive, without eviscerating the whole story! But is the book racist? I'd say no. Jim, the escaping former slave, comes across as far more humane and fully fleshed-out than many of the other, more "sivilized" characters. And Twain's sardonic humour shines forth throughout.

Speaking of eviscerating a book, the edition I read, a cheap Bantam classic, fell apart while I was reading it and is now held together with an elastic. So while semantically and morphologically speaking it's an integrated, unexpurgated edition, in the purely physical sense it is anything but! That's mainly because it was assembled with "perfect binding", a technique falling far short of perfection in which paste is slapped along the edges of a stack of unsignatured pages and a flimsy cover folded around them with the spine aligned with the paste (if you're lucky). The pages were printed with decidedly niggardly margins so as I gently spread the book open a little farther so as to be able to read it properly, I inadvertently inflicted cracked spine syndrome on Samuel Clemens' masterpiece. If he were alive today, I somehow think he might have appreciated the irony of the situation.

All of which brings me to Century Press, an Ottawa-based venture dedicated to reprinting classic works of literature in the style to which they ought to be accustomed:

https://www.centurypress.ca/

In its first publication, The Great Gatsby, the man behind Century Press took it upon himself to substitute his own word for an offensive epithet in the original. In effect, he was putting words (or a word, anyway) in the mouth of one of Fitzgerald's characters. This naturally caused considerable outrage on the part of many loyal supporters of Century Press. As a result, he has promised not to do this in future, beginning with the second work in production, The Sun Also Rises.

Which brings me to another huge can of worms: how far is it reasonable to go (or not) in terms of translations, abridgements and adaptations?

While I can't do that question justice here, I will say that what prompts it is the PBS adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, concluding this evening. It's very different from the Jules Verne original. Phileas Fogg does still go around the world in 80 days and does stop in roughly the same places as in the book. But the characters who accompany him and the things they do in each place and the reasons they do them are COMPLETELY different! Fixx has undergone both a career change and a gender reassignment and Passe-Partout is black in the PBS series. I will say that the acting and the cinematography are excellent and it's a likeable enough story. I just think it should have come with a bit more of a disclaimer. Will kids watching it in 2022 think that that's the way Jules Verne wrote it? Will they bother to find out? And does the adaptation really speak any better to what matters to people today? I recently ordered a Bande Dessinée of Around the World in 80 Days which looks to be closer to the original, in spite of being more obviously geared to a modern young audience. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it and looked at the pictures!

As this is Freedom to Read Week, I found it particularly ironic when I learned of the recent decision of the owner of the Ottawa Comic Book Shoppe owner to pull all works by Orson Scott Card off his shelves on the grounds that Card is against gay marriage (to the point of having served on committees aiming to abolish it). One wonders how much would even be left in most bookstores and libraries if we were to pull all the works by authors who subscribed to at least one politically incorrect viewpoint! Remember all the kerfuffle over the mayor's announcement(soon reversed) that the new city archives building would be named in honour of former Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton?

Admittedly, this is a slightly different situation. The Comic Book Shoppe is a private enterprise. The owner is free to stock and offer for sale whatever selection of material he pleases, assuming that the material or its sale is not in itself illegal. And selecting certain items as being likely of interest to one's customers will inevitably involve rejecting others. If we were talking about a public or school library or some other institution supported to a great extent by public funds, then wholesale elimination of one well-known (and generally well-regarded) author like that becomes far less defensible. As a few people I know have said in the tag-line to their signatures (no doubt a quote from somewhere but I don't know where), "Our library has something in it to offend everyone!"

It will be interesting to see whether the decision brings the store-owner more friends or enemies. He's located in the heart of the "gaybourhood" but I think he may find that while his customers nearly all support gay marriage, they may prove equally vociferous in their support of freedom to read!