Freedom to Read

Join the Freedom to Read (F2R) Book Club! Starting on Monday, Oct. 5 at 6 PM and continuing the first Monday of each month, the club will meet in the library to discuss a book that has been challenged, look into the reasons around the attempted ban, and discuss the book as a work. Co-hosted and sponsored by our friends at Phoenix Books Rutland, and sponsored by Friends of Rutland Free Library, Meub Associates, PLC, and Solsaa Building & Energy Solutions, LLC!

Leading the discussion will be Bill Wiles, retired adjunct professor at Vermont State University (Castleton), who taught a course on banned books for several years. The first title will be "Daddy's Roommate," by Michael Willhoite. The publisher's description reads, "This book discusses homosexuality through the eyes of a young boy whose dad is gay."

• Readers with or without library cards can borrow F2R books just by dropping by the library circulation desk.
• See the VTDigger story on the book club here!
• See the Rutland Herald story here!
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• Originally published in 1990, Daddy's Roommate has a special place in Rutland Free Library's history. A woman complained to the media about the book, seeking to have it removed from the general collection and be placed in a restricted place where patrons would have to ask to see it. June Osowski, the children's librarian, and Paula Baker, the director, stood their ground through an impassioned public debate.

The upshot was that the book stayed in the general collection, and in 1998 the library, Baker, and several trustees received a national award for intellectual freedom from the American Library Association, "For their successful defense of Daddy’s Roommate in their library’s collection and their successful mobilization of the community in support of the library’s intellectual freedom policies."

Please join us for what is bound to be an engaging conversation! Doors at 5:30, conversation starts at 6 PM.

November's book will be the classic novel of dystopian book-burning, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. That meeting will again be at the library on the first Monday of the month: Monday, Nov. 2 at 6 PM.

Since the late 1940s, Ray Bradbury has been revered for his works of science fiction and fantasy. With more than five million copies in print, Fahrenheit 451 -- originally published in 1953 -- remains his most acclaimed work.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by a totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch." Today, when libraries and schools in this country and all over the world are still "burning" certain books, Fahrenheit 451 remains a brilliantly readable and suspenseful work of even greater impact and timeliness.

On Dec. 7 we'll be tackling Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman. It's our first graphic novel (technically a memoir), and while it was originally considered controversial because of its depictions of violence, that's not what it was banned for.

The Nazis in this book are cats and the Jews in the concentration camps are mice, and (as in the World War II concentration camps), the mice are stripped nude in the camp. The complaint that got the book banned from a Tennessee school was over nudity (as well as coarse language and violence), and so a rumor started that it was banned because of cartoon mice, which would be a little like banning Donald Duck because he doesn't wear pants. However, as Spiegelman himself noted, the complaint was due to an image he drew of his mother's body in a bathtub after she killed herself.

As Speigelman said in an interview with PEN America:

"Okay, so ‘this is a picture of nudity, so that we can prohibit, and this over here, this has a bad word.’ As far as they’re concerned, as long as they stopped short of saying we’re banning this because this history makes us uncomfortable, we don’t want our kids to be exposed to these things, they’re on safer ground."

Please join the conversation monthly on the first Monday, from 6 PM in the Fox Room.