The question that never seems to get asked in any of this “censorship/ban” conversation: Why are authors of YA and child books writing books with such controversial content? Should they? And why are the publishers encouraging them?

This never used to be a problem because both authors and publishers just knew better than to “go there.” Now, it’s like a race to go there. Whatever restraint existed has been blown up, and it has left parents scrambling to hold back the flood when the authors and publishers used be the gatekeepers.

A public library is just that: a public service facility. To that end, the local community sets the standards and the folks who run the library should ensure the catalog reflects the community standards. Different communities may have different standards. The local libraries should reflect those standards and abide by them.

This is how it has always worked, and it worked well. We need to stop trying to impose some kind of “one size fits all” mentality where the self-appointed power brokers of the coasts tell the rural folks in the Midwest that they suck because they don’t want their kids exposed to books they find objectionable. Likewise, the Midwesterners should not be telling the coast-dwellers how to stock their libraries.

I have noticed some authors greatly overdo the use of “made his/her/their way” when talking about characters traveling. A few times is OK, but it can become the de facto movement expression, and it’s grating after a while.

In one of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker books (I forget which), he writes a chapter with the narrator unspooling an event where two women are headed for a fateful intersection. The old woman is clearly up to something, while the young woman and her baby have suffered a car beakdown in a deserted stretch of forest.

The old woman is likely a practitioner of dark arts, with evil intentions that fit the general direction of the story, and she is headed to do something unspeakable. The young girl woman just had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and something gruesome is going to happen to her as she frets about her situation. It’s an almost unbearable setup, ready to occur violently in the primal, moody Maine woods.

Yet when the old woman pulls up to the young woman’s car, we see that everything we thought would happen plays out in reverse.

It’s a masterclass of writing that had me reread that chapter three or four times to get an idea of how Connolly pulled off the switcheroo so elegantly. I read that a dozen years ago or so, and I am still impressed. That Charlie Parker series has some exceptional writing, especially of setting, internal character dialog, and mood.

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Yes, there are two sides to every story and the winners write the history, but this book undermines critical thinking.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a novel about the impermanence/permanence of memory and the hold place has on people. As such, it meanders, fades, and repeats, while characters shift and become intermingled, all in the service of the novel’s themes. In spots, it’s almost stream of consciousness.

In short, it’s a challenge to read.

And yet, a couple decades after I read it, The Unconsoled still sticks with me, and not a week goes by that I don’t find myself thinking about or referring to its ideas.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (better known as the writer of the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”) wrote a fascinating take on this as the protagonist’s every time jump leaves copies of himself in time. Gerrold is less interested in the time travel and more in what it means existentially to have so many copies of yourself running around the universe.

This is one of those few novels that I still ponder years after I read it.

The quality of every new novel I’ve read in the past five years is a notch or two below what it was previously—and that was below five to ten years before that. Even my favorite authors aren’t writing as well as they used to.

I think a major culprit is publishers jettisoning editors and “book doctors” to save money. And this shows in the final product. It’s just not as tight and polished as it once was.