I learnt a long time ago to not comment too much on books and writing that I haven’t read (or if I haven’t read haven’t at least taken the time to learn about). When I was young, I did as all young people who like to read did, and I started to work my way through my parents’ bookshelves. I was most interested in my mother’s books, but for a short time I delved into my father’s. Where Mum had Edna O’Brien, Doris Lessing and science fiction, Dad’s shelves were filled with texts on philosophy and Modern European History. Thick, hardback books with titles I have long since forgotten. This included a book which is now more or less banned and which I don’t want to mention by name, but you can probably guess what it was. I assumed—because it was on my father’s shelves—that it was a book about how awful war was. My parents’ lived their politics. There were no two sides to every argument–there were my parents’ politics (correct) and everyone else’s (wrong). They were left-wing at a time when left-wing was still left-wing; and in the shadow of the Vietnam war, Dad was stridently anti-war.
As I had done with most of the other books I pulled off my father’s shelves, I didn’t read a page of this book, or if I did I would have been quickly bored and stopped reading. Without reading it, I did assume that it followed the logic of Dad’s anti-war stance. For whatever reason—probably because it was thick and therefore a sign of how smart I was, I put the book in my bag to take to school. Whether I showed it to anyone or whether anyone saw it, I don’t remember because all other memory of that incident is eclipsed by the eruption of my mother’s white-hot fury when she saw the book in my bag. Most of this anger was directed at my father, but I certainly bore the brunt of some of it.
The meaning underlying all of this has grown both deeper and more intense for me over the years. While I’m glad Mum found the book I do have a deep sense of shame at even having picked that book up, deeper still that I might have taken that book to school. This sense of shame has never diminished; if anything it has grown even sharper and even now I will sometimes wake in the night suddenly struck by the awful enormity of this childhood incident.
This has had a huge impact on my understanding of the power of words and books. It also means that I’m very, very careful with opinions about books I haven’t read or feel I haven’t understood. I felt this most keenly as a children’s librarian. I read as many of the books I bought for the library shelves as I could. I worked my way through all the shortlists because I knew they would be sought after by both children and their parents; I read commentary and reviews to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything; and I was particularly careful that I had least skimmed the books that I recommended to the children and teenagers in my reading care.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying it’s been a devastating week for an ex-children’s and young people’s librarian.