Subway Reads

But What About the Children?!

One of my least favorite phrases. Ever. So it is with some degree of interest that I've been following the recent brouhaha surrounding The Higher Power of Lucky, a recent Newbery Award winner with a precocious grasp of the male anatomy (er, no pun intended ...). Yes, it's the word "scrotum," and it's on the first page.

The real issue here? Squeamishness. To pull a quote from the New York Times piece on Sunday chronicling the outrage of parents, teachers, and librarians:

"Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. 'I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson.'"

Ah, vocab ... such a tricky subject. Perhaps it's better, after all, to simply allow kids to pick up the much more highly edifying bits of linguistic flotsam from billboards, magazines, tv shows, and movies. As anyone who has made it through middle school can attest, words such as "scrotum" are not exactly the first ones learned on the playground.

The question this "controversy" raises for me is not at what age a child should be able to correctly label the human anatomy, but rather when will we adults stop using our bodies as dirty words?

After the jump, this week's uncensored line-up of Subway Reads:

The Anthropological Lens, 2nd Edition
by James L. Peacock

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris

Go Ask Alice
by Anonymous

Notes from the Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Last Detective
by Robert Crais