(Guest blogged by NonnyMouse)

   It probably comes as no surprise to regular C&L readers to learn that I grew up in a liberal-minded household; although at the time, being a kid, I didn't especially realize just how liberal such attitudes were. Our house was filled with books, magazines and newspapers, everything from a revered set of encyclopedias (the Google of the 1960's) to stacks of ratty romance paperbacks. We had at least forty years worth of National Geographic magazines, from which I gleaned juicy facts for hundreds of school reports. I learned to read from Humpty-Dumpty magazines at the age of three and had read Ivanhoe by the time I was seven, although I have to admit I didn't understand much of it at the time.

It didn't matter. What mattered was that nothing... nothing... was off-limits in our house when it came to the written word. I read Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde and the complete works of Jonathan Swift, the back of cereal boxes, A Little Princess and Mein Kampf and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Beauty, Dr. Seuss and Archie comics, a huge box of pulp science-fiction novels from a garage sale, Jehovah's Witness Biblical tracts that got shoved in the letterbox, the perpetual Cherry Ames, Army Nurse novels my grandmother inevitably sent us every Christmas, every book ever written by Philip Wylie, several year's worth of a wonderful science magazine for teens to which my Aunt Ruth gave me a subscription (‘Build a Working Computer from Empty Matchboxes!), until the magazine went bust and folded. The written word, from high-brow to no-brow, was sacrosanct.

That liberal attitude toward the freedom of the written word was severely tested when at twelve I found a rather dog-eared paperback tucked behind some cans of paint in the garage - my father did a rather comical (and horrified) double-take when he found me lying on the sofa, legs dangling over one side, and puzzling over the nuances of what was an out-and-out hardcore pornographic novel. He nervously asked if I had any questions about what I was reading. ‘Do people really do this?' Um, sometimes. ‘Yuuuck! But you and Mom, you don't...?' Um, sometimes. ‘Double yuuuuuck!' Which probably did more to ease my dad's mind about my prepubescent proclivities than any euphemistic harangue on sex could ever have achieved. (My vast childhood reading habits also endowed me with this nifty erudite and comprehensive vocabulary, which comes in pretty handy now that I've grown up to be a published novelist).

So the idea that books, any book, should be banned - for any reason - is a complete anathema. Fahrenheit 451 is fiction. Censorship, unfortunately, is not.

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