(This blog is an expansion of my post, Authors Riffing on Why Books Save Lives, that originally appeared on the Literacy & NCTE blog. The original post is copyright 2017 by the National Council of Teachers of English and is used with permission.)

We, who have known each other for many years, learned more about each other that night and about our mothers. One member even shared a resource about dying as a natural process, a source many of us are now ready to consult for ourselves. None of us was dying that night, although several previous members have, but The Long Goodbye, like the nearly 400 books we’ve read month by month over the years, enriched our relationships with one another, the text, and, yes, even ourselves.

 Maybe it’s the COVID pandemic or the increasing numbers of shootings in my little town and across the nation, but grief was the theme of the last two books we read in a second book group, one I’ve been a member of for over 20 years and whose members were my colleagues at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

While retired now, I spent my career reading and writing with students and teachers.  As director of NCTE’s Intellectual Freedom Center, I also spent a good deal of time defending the rights of students to choose and read various books in the classroom and of their teachers to select those texts. I knew innately that books saved lives, that kids were up to reading books that adults often complained about, and that kids benefit greatly from those books.  But I needed proof.

So in 2016, Joan Bertin, now retired executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, and I, then director of the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center, conducted a survey of authors whose works we’d defended recently. We had a hunch about three things that the survey proved to be true: 1) what books mean to kids doesn’t figure enough in defenses of challenged to books; 2) that kids tell authors what books mean to them; and 3) that “kid testimony” could become some of the best rationales for kids to read these books.

The results of the survey confirmed our hunches. Kids told us . . .

In 2017 at the NCTE Annual Convention, Joan and I presented our findings during a session featuring three young adult authors: Matt de la Peña, Jason Reynolds, and Laurie Halse Anderson.

Matt de la Peña started off by reminding us that while books can save the lives of readers, they also save the lives of writers—that there’s an obvious symbiosis between writers and readers and that, for writers, respect for the reader is a big part of the equation. He told us how and why his book was removed from the Mexican-American Studies program in the Tucson, Arizona, Schools, how it was a student who came to him for help because his book really meant something to her, and how he sent contraband copies of Mexican White Boy to the students whose copies had been taken right out of their hands.

Matt de la Pena, Jason Reynolds,
Laurie Halse Anderson

“Wished I’d had a book we could cry into,” Jason Reynolds lamented, referring to the story he’d just told us about watching a friend get arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, basically for being Black. He went on to remind us of the “beauty of books to create a space for that ice to melt slowly.” He chastised people for their fear of being human, their fear of discomfort, and noted that these fears keep our kids in danger and insure that he “gets banned as a person every day.”

Laurie Halse Anderson reminded us that “The truth is that we save each other.”  Then she shared a post-it note comment from a reader who said, “Comfort is the biggest privilege of all because if you’re comfortable, you don’t have to be afraid. Until you can see yourself, you cannot be yourself.”

 It’s been a very long time since I was a maudlin 10th grader weeping my way through the thousand pages of Gone With the Wind and slogging through the “Slough of Despond” in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.  But I have never lost my way from books or from reading for myself and with others. Now I read in every genre—interspersed with my dessert of mysteries—and daily enjoy reading with my eyes and ears. Books have delivered me to myself and to the world. And what they have given me, what I’ve learned and keep learning is—well, it’s so very much of who I am.