Books and Apples

A timely fun stopgap while writer writes whatever she's writing.

Dear Reader,

I have been working on this week’s story since forever. It’s about a winery in Staten Island and, if you stop rolling your eyes for a minute at the thought of putting Staten Island and winery in the same sentence, I will tell you that it’s a very fine winery and I’ve been to quite a few of the best. Unfortunately, though, I’m hitting the perennial writer problem of having a ton of reporting to distill down into this tiny Substack space. In other words, I’m not finished and I don’t want to rush it.

And so, I thought you might enjoy these two little entries. They are very timely, both with calls to action—one very public, the other joyfully personal. I hope you enjoy them and I’m pretty certain Staten Island and its winery will be celebrated next week!

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Save Civilization. Read a Banned Book.

Banned Books Week begins this Sunday, October 1. Last year I revealed that between 2021 and 2022 1,648 book titles were challenged, outright banned, and pulled from school and public libraries for the crime that their writers had the wisdom and tenacity to write about sexuality, gender equality, race, civil rights and activism. Having characters that were exemplary members of a religious minority, with Jews and Muslims at the top of target list, got books in trouble, too.

This year, The American Library Association tallied that, between January 1 and August 31, 2023, there were 1,915 books challenged with an additional 695 attempts to censor library materials and disrupt staff’s services. Since ALA only tallies the number of books reported to them, the full scope of book censorship is higher. These numbers don’t include books that were pulled from shool curriculums and school and public library shelves because individuals in the community or outside organizations rallied against them. (The group that most keeps me up at night—Moms for Liberty.) Challenges are not considered banning because the books could, in theory, be returned, except, at best, it’s a slow walk back to the shelves for most of them. Many times, the books are judged not by anyone reading them but by the mere suggestion of their subject matter that someone you and your children don’t know has deemed inapprobriate. And the worse thing about all this is that many dedicated librarians, teachers, and school board members have quit because they’ve been threatened and outright accosted.

Books, by their nature, have always been seen as uniquely threatening to society because the act of reading is such a powerful method of learning and exchanging new ideas. And this is why history has always repeated itself in burning books and silencing, sometimes even prosecuting, writers, booksellers, and teachers. This is why Banned Books Week matters. So, please, do the following:

• Buy one or several of 2023 most banned books and pass them along to those who would benefit from them, especially children and teenagers because their books are the ones that are being taken away the most.

• Contribute to organizations who are in the trenches fighting for our right to read whatever the hell we want to read.

• Hug and support librarians and teachers. Stand up for gutsy school board members. Vote.

Autumn Uses for Children

One of the practicalities of having access to a child at this time of year is the excuse they provide to spend a day picking apples. Nothing is as enjoyable as wandering through orchards heavy with fruit with nothing much on your mind than filling up a bushel basket of apples. Sometimes the orchard is attached to a pumpkin field to trip over in pursuit of the just-right huge orange lump. Generally, there’s a stand hawking apple cider and, if you time it right and know the local laws, there may also be harvest beer and hard cider available. These spots are usually farther out in the countryside. But that’s okay because experience has taught that a child will mercifully fall asleep on long car rides.

Of course, many adults do all this on their own. But experience, too, bears out that adults, so centered on their own tiny worlds of work and sad nonsense, forget the simple pleasure of being outdoors on an autumn day when the sunlight seems to filter through stained glass. Nor do they remember that, when you cart your bushel basket home, there is the delight of cluttering your kitchen with pots, pans, and flour in the service of pies and cakes.

At the moment, the children around us are decidely too big to shove into the car and are known to dispute our adult authority. But we’re going out this weekend anyway. It’s the only remedy we can think of to relieve a household bursting with stress and satisfy a husband who chomps through bowls of apples with abandon. It’s just about the most sane way to spend this first October weekend.