What life censors books reveal

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is writing about her youth. Children and teenagers who read, especially those who are introverts, learn from reading what many of their peers learn from experience or, perhaps more commonly, from older kids. We, Schwartz and I, are speaking mostly about sex, but there are plenty of other adult mysteries that open up to youngsters who read.

Today most bookstores have large and seemingly growing sections of books for young adults, meaning older kids. Such sections did not exist in my own youth, and there were relatively few books to stack in such sections had they existed. When I left children's books behind, somewhere about the seventh grade, I went directly to the adult section of the local public library. Words that weren't spoken in my home were written in these books. Sex acts, death, violent crimes, imaginary worlds (such as those in Green Mansions and Journey to the Center of the Earth) opened up to me. This was an education unlike anything I had learned in school.

As I think about it, however, I am not so sure this phenomenon, books revealing what is "censored in life," isn't true almost as much for adult readers as for younger ones. So many things just aren't talked about, or are spoken of rarely, in adult conversation. Homosexuality is mentioned much more than it used to be, yet it remains a rare subject, at least among the people I converse with. How about the most personal thoughts and actions of other human beings? People don't often talk openly about certain things, yet amazingly they write books about them.

And then there are all those subjects that fascinate you but not anyone else you know. If you don't live in a big city you may not be able to find someone, much less a group of someones, who shares your interest in butterflies, say, or antique pedal cars. The web now makes possible connections with others who share your interests, but for a long time we depended on books to learn what we wanted to know about these obscure subjects.