Books are dangerous. That’s why we need the freedom to read them.

Or rather, I learned about them when my grade-school pals and I deputized one of our posse to go home and ask a parent about the wet dream references in our second-favorite Blume book, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t—a boy’s-eye-view counterpart to her best-selling Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

In the latter, published in 1970, 11-year-old Margaret and her friends talk frankly about boys, bras, and periods. I read Margaret for the first time at age nine, five interminable years before my own period arrived, then re-read it so many times the pages came loose from the paperback binding.

That book gave me validation. Margaret was Jewish (well, half-Jewish, on her dad’s side), and smart, and self-doubting, and flat-chested, and she channeled her angst into private conversations with God. It gave me hope: that my body, too, would change, albeit more slowly than I wished. It offered company; though both my parents were Jewish, they weren’t believers, and I was nearly alone among my Jewish friends in not having a bat mitzvah.

Dangerous questions?

I would have been baffled then to know that Margaret had been a target of book banners ever since its publication. Their objections? Margaret’s questioning stance toward organized religion and the book’s candid take on puberty, including Margaret’s dismay that she lags behind her friends in developing breasts and starting to menstruate—the very themes that left me feeling less freakish, less isolated.

Then Again was next on the communal reading list. In the cafeteria, my pals and I passed it around, dog-earing pages we didn’t understand. Which one of us would be bold enough to ask our mothers? Did Diana volunteer or draw the short straw? I can’t recall, but I do remember her returning to lunch the next day with an answer so intimate and mortifying that she had to whisper it to each of us in turn.

An arena for ideas

My parents never restricted my reading. In fact, they abetted it, making me literate at age three thanks to a program called How to Teach Your Baby to Read, which consisted of flash cards—some the size of a car’s license plate, others smaller—each holding a simple word in bright red letters: Mommy. Door. Chair.

After that, they were hands-off. They didn’t intervene when I encountered graphic descriptions of hunger-striking suffragists being force-fed in the historical novel Never Jam Today. They didn’t object when I pulled Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care off the hallway shelf just so I could read the “how to tell your kids about sex” chapter, nor when Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying migrated from my mom’s night stand to my own.

And they did not join the small chorus of anxious parents who wondered whether we were too young, in 7^th grade, to read Paul Zindel’s 1969 novel My Darling, My Hamburger, in which a high-school girl has an illegal abortion. In my parents’ view, books were a place to learn about experiences beyond the perimeter of my own life, an arena for ideas…and a healthy pastime for an only child who spent a lot of time alone.

The threat of waking up

My parents were mostly right. Here’s how they were wrong. Certainly, books are sources of solace, growth, and entertainment. They are also subversive, counter-cultural. Even a novel innocuous (by today’s YA standards) as Margaret is a threat if you believe 11-year-olds should be kept in the dark about their own sexual development and that religious practice should be off-limits for skepticism.

Books can challenge authority, shatter taboos, and undermine the status quo; that’s exactly why they are so often in the crosshairs of conservatives who want to keep power and authority exactly as they are. Yes, Blume’s book was a balm when I needed it, but it was Never Jam Today that offered a wake-up—one I never forgot—about the corrosive power of the state and the ability of ordinary people to up-end it.

Reading the next generation

A generation later, I had to decide: Was our daughter old enough, at six, for a read-aloud of Harry Potter? An adult friend cautioned that the series grew emotionally darker with each successive book. What about The Hunger Games, when she was nine? Sure, it’s a sly allegory, a dig at capitalism and institutional corruption, but it’s also violent, with teens killing teens in a televised “game” of survival.

My partner and I conferred with each other, with other parents, even with our daughter’s 2^nd-grade teacher. Our verdict: We would read those books together, aloud, then discuss them. Our daughter could ask questions. So would we. And both those series raised some valuable ones: Is it more important to be loyal to your friends than to follow the rules? How do you know when the government is lying? What’s the most effective way to counter evil?

Opening a dangerous classic

In 2024, according to the American Library Association, there were attempts to remove or censor more than 2,400 different titles, compared to an average 273 titles per year that were challenged between 2001 and 2020. Increasingly, those challenges come not from parents or individual library users, but from organized groups; the most common reasons cited for censorship in 2024 were claims of illegal obscenity for minors; LGBTQ+ characters or themes; and topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

Here’s where the book-banners and I agree: Books (and articles and journals and manifestos) are dangerous. And here’s where we differ: I think that’s exactly why we should be reading them.

So on July 4, I’ll pull out a classic in honor and memory of my in-laws, professors of communication, who had a ritual of reading the Declaration of Independence out loud at their condominium’s annual barbecue.

Donald Trump recently told an ABC News reporter that the Declaration of Independence, framed and hung in the Oval Office, was “a declaration of unity and love and respect.”

Which only proves that he’s never read the thing. Because—news flash—the Declaration is not a love note or a chorus of Kumbaya. It’s about the excesses of a monarchy and the bold notion of self-government, through insurrection, if necessary.

It’s a blinkered document, for sure, limited in ways we are still working to repair. It’s also a courageous, visionary, and radical one. This Independence Day, we’ll fire up the grill, we’ll take turns reading it, and then we’ll talk.

At top: The New York Public Library’s flagship Fifth Avenue building celebrates the freedom to read. (Photo by Anndee Hochman.)