This year’s Freedom to Read week kicks off tomorrow, February 21, so let’s celebrate our freedom to read by exploring books that have been challenged or banned, contested in some way! Every year, Freedom to Read week and Banned Books Week (in the fall) roll around and we’re prompted to talk about why it’s important to have the freedom to access all sorts of different books, whether they agree with our point of view or not. We might think that banned or contested books would probably be extreme in their content, but in fact, most of us will definitely recognize one of consistently contested or banned books/series: Harry Potter. Yes, Harry has been being hunted down not just by Voldemort, but also by members of the general public. Apparently it’s been contested since the series came out, mostly for religious reasons – luring kids into practicing witchcraft! – but can you imagine a world where Harry Potter was successfully banned? Where we’d have had to as kids to exchange contraband Potter books in order to get our hands on the latest release, if at all? Actually, I can imagine that kind of world, especially since 2020 gave us, among other things, the national security law in Hong Kong, not to mention earlier this year, Hungary made LGBTQIA+ disclaimers mandatory on children’s books. So it’s a good time to pause and not take for granted our freedom to read.
All posts by Karen
Chocolate Chip Cookies and the Search for Perfection
A little bit of Chocolate Chip Cookie adventure happened on my Instagram feed a little while ago, when a baker I follow compared the bakers’ percentages of ingredients between the OG Toll House, Jacques Torres’ (the best*), and their own version of it. The post, from what I remember, actually had a bit more to it than just the comparisons of bakers’ percentages and included a lament following the publicization of a new “perfect” chocolate chip cookie recipe that didn’t pay homage to the history of chocolate chip cookies and those that came before this new recipe, but I’m not here today to dwell on the erasure of chefs and innovators in kitchens**. We’re here to talk about how to get to the perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie for you (or for whomever you’re throwing them to – from a distance, of course, so throw them you must – this upcoming Valentine’s Day).
As a result of the tiny bit of digging I did to write this article, it came to my notice that some of you might remember a time when chocolate chip cookies… did not exist. You might even remember when they came into existence. Isn’t that incredible?
Here’s Ruth Wakefield, the inventor (!!) of the chocolate chip cookie. Could you imagine? Being the person who invented the chocolate chip cookie. And then also somehow falling into obscurity over the years (because did you know who Wakefield was before this moment?) even though you invented the chocolate chip cookie, which, need I remind you, has not fallen into obscurity whatsoever.
Clean
Publishing a book in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic on the topic of cleanliness and how we’re overdoing the clearing off of our skin microbiome, and too often, is… bold. The author, James Hamblin, addresses this in the introduction, as you’ll find no mention of COVID-19 in the pages of Clean (also available on Overdrive as an e-book and an e-audiobook), since this was written before the pandemic hit. Its message, however, makes for even queasier reflection once we start thinking about how much 2020 has seen an uptick in the use of hand sanitizer and soap – and a necessary one, of course! I’m not even suggesting for a moment that we should reconsider how much we’re washing our hands in the midst of a pandemic where washing our hands properly might literally save lives. But similar messages have been raised about how we’re destroying our skin microbiome on a much more frequent basis than might be healthy: Beyond Soap by Sandy Skotnicki, was published back in 2018, for example, along with Missing Microbes by Martin J. Blaser (2014), which talks about antibiotic overuse and how that is changing our relationship with the microbes around us.