Reading Summary - Honnold (2011)

Honnold, R. (2011, June 1). With No Rights, What is Left. VOYA, 108-109.

This brief, two-page article advocates for intellectual rights for teen readers, citing examples from her personal and professional experiences with censorship. She writes about having been forbidden as a child to read Catcher in the Rye, trying to keep her own child from reading a particular book unsuccessfully, and dealing with a library patron who campaigned to have all teen books with any sexual content outside of marriage removed. The same patron referred to the library as a "porn shop" and referred to the teen programs that included Dungeons and Dragons gaming groups as "satanic meetings." Honnold advocates for teens' freedom to read and feel a responsibility to uphold that freedom professionally. She recommends that teens, librarians, educators, and parents communicate with each other rather than lashing out and attempting to ban or boycott. Her own unsuccessful attempt to censor her daughter's reading leads her to believe that undue attention to a book only makes teens want to read them even more and do so secretly without proper support.

This article is very important to me, as someone who also supports teen reading freedom. I was personally very un-censored as a child, and as far as I can tell, it didn't screw me up. My mom is a former middle school teacher who has "read a banned book" t-shirts, and launches a one-woman banned books week informational on her social media accounts every year. It's important to think about what patron disapproval is like on a personal level. This patron went on the radio and wrote letters to the editor about the librarian who wrote this article. That kind of public disapproval would be hard to deal with and would make sticking to one's convictions more difficult. It is important to understand not only intellectually but also on a personal level what it it like to champion intellectual freedom.