On Book Bans and Reading Habits
In 2022, a guy named Ben Fox, building a website to help others find new books to read, contacted me asking if I’d write five short book reviews on a theme related to my book, Murder of an Uncommon Man. He also asked that I use the superlative “best” in the title. I chose books that inspired me while I was writing, but I had to squint to fit them into some kind of theme. I called it The best memoirs about surviving dysfunctional family, gender identity crisis, and murder.
Every October since then, he’s asked me to contribute notes on my three favourite reads of the last twelve months, and share the opportunity for you to do the same.
My recreational reading is most often queer fiction or memoir, with an emphasis on female and nonbinary relationships, and I’ve been surprised by how many of them have been banned or challenged. That led me to seek out banned books recently and marvel at what is labelled “obscene.”
The province of Alberta made headlines this summer for demanding that public school libraries remove books containing “explicit sexual content” by January 1, 2026. They highlighted four books that they’d found in Edmonton and Calgary school libraries, one of which was on my list of best memoirs in 2022 (Fun Home by Alison Bechdel). A second, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, I read in 2022 after seeing it in a New York Times story.
I hadn’t read Blankets by Craig Thompson or Flamer by Mike Curato, so I picked them up and didn’t see anything portrayed that most teenagers haven’t seen already. Personally, without lesbian, trans, or nonbinary content, I wouldn’t have read them, and blame Alberta conservatives for forcing my hand! One positive that came of the exercise is that they curated a wonderful collection of “explicit” content from the books, likely shared widely by the very students they were attempting to keep it from.
In the end, fewer books were pulled from the libraries when the Ministry of Education was forced to specify that only “explicit visual depictions of a sexual act” were verboten. This was thanks to the Edmonton school board initially listing more than 200 books that included written descriptions of sex, such as The Handmaid’s Tale. The group that called for the book ban in the spring, vying for a Guinness World Record in ironic names with “Parents for Choice in Education,” was angered by Edmonton’s “malicious compliance.”
Oh, it made me so happy.
Even in the darkest of provinces for the rights of children to read what they want, declare their own pronouns, and live their best lives, there are librarians and parents fighting back against ignorance and bigotry.
Here are links to my favourite reads of the past few years:
And my reading lists for those years with top tens:
What did you think? How are you doing? I’d love to chat…