I fell in Love at the age of 10....

If anyone is to blame for my fall into the geek world, it would be my aunt.

I received the set of Narnia books from her....all of them in a boxed set. I devoured them, one after the other and it was like this fire was lit inside of me.

MOAR!!!

So after those books, I started reading other books. One of them was called, I fuzzily recall, "Space Cat Goes to Mars." Yes. And I think there were other books in that series.

I entered the fantasy world with nary a glance back.

Here's a little secret that I want to share: when a girl has no friends and is lonely and sad most of the time, books can fill an empty void. Books can make the hurt go away for a while and I was always, always accepted in the worlds I entered. It didn't matter WHO I was. It didn't matter that I wasn't popular or pretty and that I was often afraid and cried when nobody was around.

I had a free pass, I had the Golden Ticket, dammit, to Somewhere Else.

And I used it. If I had a passport, I would have it filled with all the places I went. Narnia. The places of Ray Bradbury. Star Wars. The world of Krynn. CJ Cherryth. Stamp here, stamp there....stay here a while and just....soak it all in.

And it wasn't just fantasy. Fiction novels pulled me in as well...and poetry. And Shakespeare.

And I became a well rounded geek girl with quite the literary education at my fingertips and within my mind and, if I fell in Love, also in my heart.

I have moved from place to place and the first thing I always did, even before checking out where the local grocery store was or the gas station, was find out where the library was. And to get myself a library card as soon as I could.

I have my priorities, after all.

So it is with grave puzzlement that I see people who want to ban books to certain age groups. Books that are, to them, dangerous. Inappropriate. Seditious.

I understand that children should read books that they can handle. Emotional maturity is a good measuring stick towards what is appropriate for books and tv shows and movies and video games. Anything that we take in must be something we can deal with and not feel as though it were something we weren't ready for.

And I would like to think that those who are in charge of a child's development, whether it's their parent or their teacher or a mentor, would know what would be appropriate for their viewing or reading. And I am pretty sure that a child knows what they can handle as well. I know that I wouldn't read something that disturbed me. Or that I didn't understand.

Children aren't stupid. That has always been my stance and always will be. I wasn't stupid as a child and now that I'm raising children, I find that they aren't particularly stupid, either.

And I find that the books that are being nominated are the very books that people should be reading. Books that fire the imagination. Books that fire outrage. Books that make a person think. Dream. Feel.

These very books can start a fire within someone's heart. They can start a revolution. They can start....well, someone just might take up paper and pen and write and inspire someone else.

It's a chain reaction of fire and heart and emotion that links one person to another and binds us all together. Just by words on a page. How awesome is that???

Yeah. It's geek awesome.

So I wonder...I wonder if these people who want to ban books so that some or none can read them...what are they really afraid of?

Words on a page that can transform a person's thoughts, feelings....actions.

Powerful stuff.

Hm. In that case, we should just ban ALL books, not some.

That's some serious juju there.



K.