Monkey see, monkey do

Wendy wrote in about something that’s been on my mind for the past few weeks: book ratings. There are plenty of good books out there, but there are also many with foul language, explicit sexual content, and/or gratuitous violence. What’s a bookworm to do?

Before I watch a movie, I always check ScreenIt.com or Kids in Mind, primarily because I don’t trust the ratings system (nor do I usually trust recommendations, I must add — not unless I know the recommender has similar media standards). Friends will tell me, “Oh, this movie is so great!” but then I check it on ScreenIt and find it laden with innuendo and profanity and even on occasion gross immorality. Better to make my own decision based on the content of the film, and sites like ScreenIt allow me to do so in a way that helps me stick with my standards.

But there’s nothing like that for books.

Now, there are a couple of differences between books and film that need to be taken into account. First, movies are on average two hours long, whereas it can take anywhere from a couple of hours to days, weeks, or months to read a book (depending on many factors). Second, movies leave an indelible audiovisual imprint the instant something bad comes on, whereas with books you have a little bit of time before your mind forms the image.

Regardless of the format, however, objectionable content is just that: objectionable. And being a morally conscious person, I’ve chosen to avoid such and instead seek out that which is “virtuous, lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy.”

To that end, I avoid most modern fiction.

Not that old necessarily equals good or that new equals bad, but as a general rule, older stuff is safer. (Again, this doesn’t always hold true — there’s some pretty raunchy stuff in Chaucer and Boccaccio, and I’m sure there are plenty of modern authors who are clean.)

I also can’t help but wonder about the books my kids will read someday. Personally, I don’t want my kids reading those modern coming-of-age books that basically read as how-to guides for oral sex or whatnot. Nor do I want them picking up new swear words. I do realize that I can’t stop all of it from coming through, and so the most important thing is to teach them what’s good and how to recognize evil and shun it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t put up barriers to keep most of the filth away from them while they’re building up that inner strength.

As for myself, I try to pick up on clues from the book cover text or Amazon reviews or LibraryThing discussions that will give hints as to whether something is inappropriate or not. It’s not perfect, but when I find a book that’s bad (in my view, of course; we’ve already talked censorship through :)), I close it and return it to the library.

However, it would be really nice to see something like ScreenIt but for books.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on LibraryThing, and so I’ve thought about the possibility of using a peer-rated system (social networking). But not ratings, per se — the only way to pull it off is to provide an objective list of possibly offensive material. (ScreenIt’s categories would be a good start.) User-generated content would allow the site to grow faster, and standards-conscious parents and others could contribute, but then you also have the problem of nasties getting in the system to corrupt it. I don’t know how often that would happen, but it’s a possibility.

If I didn’t have a billion other projects going on right now (I’m halfway through with Project Cumorah and hope to finish it by tomorrow at the latest), I’d give it a shot, but alas, it’s something that’ll have to fall to someone else.

In the meantime, any ideas? Flaws? Alternatives?

Well $#!*!!! I guess that leaves my site out.

I’d be remiss to leave the cursing people out of my life. Alas, some of my closest and dearest friends and family have been talented cursers. I guess it just helps to know that real people are speaking those words. And I’m just @#$@$ fine with that. :)

Ever since discovering ScreenIt some years ago, I’ve wished a similar thing (or even simple ratings) had been around when I was younger. If it had been, I mightn’t have gone from being such a big fiction reader, to pretty much ignoring novels unless a bunch of trusted people recommend them to me.

I could see some benefit in a site that addresses something like this. I don’t think that LibraryThing is the way to go (though I love it and am a paying member), but perhaps a wiki-based format would be useful, or even wiki-style editing mashed up with a structured blogging microformat type of thing for stylistic consistency. Perhaps you could tie it back to Amazon or LibraryThing though for covers and catalogue information. Food for thought…

Um, what coming-of-age novels have you read? Because I’ve never come across one that would even come close to fitting the “how-to guides for oral sex,” and I’ve read some stuff you probably would consider objectionable.

I guess my problem is that there’s no sense of scale in this post, so I’m unsure as to exactly what kind of books you are referring to. Seriously, I’d like some specific examples of what you regard as objectionable fiction.

I think I have a higher threshold than many people do for potentially objectionable content, but this is just an issue of my personal guidelines concerning what I’m okay exposing myself to and how much I trust myself to brush aside things I find questionable or uncomfortable. And I certainly respect individual preferences on both ends of the scale.

I do have to agree with Liz, however, in wondering what you’ve encountered that could be considered a “how-to guide for oral sex.” I realize modern fiction contains comparatively more questionable content than does a lot of older literature, but I also feel fairly safe in asserting that, in general, most works that have literary merit do not rely on gratuitous use of such content–incidentally, this is how I draw my personal line of appropriateness: if it’s gratuitous, I don’t read it; if it has obvious relevance and importance to the work (and to the contemporary issues and perspectives it’s meant to address), I usually do.

Eight: I’ll admit that I find profanity less offensive than sexual content, nor do I think that having a, ahem, wide vocabulary makes one a bad person, and it’s certainly something that real people are doing. But real people are doing a lot of really bad things as well — just read the papers! — so I don’t think that’s necessarily a good metric to go by. I just feel that profanity doesn’t have to be part of one’s vocabulary, and that it’s not exactly consistent with how a disciple of Christ should act. (And now I know someone’s going to bring up J. Golden. :))

dp: Indeed. Last night I checked out Neuromancer, hearing that it was the novel that revitalized science fiction. Warning sign #1: one of the raving quotes on the back cover said, “Psychosexual.” Huh? I decided to give it two pages, just to be fair. Well, on the second page I ran into the f*** word, so it was a pretty easy decision. (And even if there hadn’t been all of that, I still didn’t like his style — I only had to read two paragraphs to know that. I much prefer older books, like H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man which I started reading after that as my recovery process. :))

As for the ScreenItesque site, I think the wiki-style with structured blogging is a good way to go. It’d have to be clear to people that they’re not making moral judgments on the book, but rather making an objective report on what could be objectionable content. It’d be nice to integrate into both Amazon and LibraryThing for reviews and such (and I’m sure there are other book-reviewing sites out there).

Liz and Katherine: My statement was probably a resident of the realm of hyperbole, just visiting for the day, but I’ll give a brief biographical sketch of the man (keeping in mind that he may be exaggerating things here and there). I went to a Utah children’s writers’ panel last year, and one of the questions had to do with objectionable content and such. Several of the writers described books they’d read lately that they felt were good examples of whatever point they were trying to make, and one of them told about a book where the narrator is a fly on the wall watching oral sex go on. (And she seemed to think that was fine!) This is the origin of my comment. I don’t remember the title of the book, and I know I’m making it out to be worse than it is, but I think that it’s going to get that bad within the near future. All of the moral fences have been battered down.