So, "A Year of Reading Dangerously," comes to what I consider the first weighty tome. (Had realized over the weekend I forgot a lede ... bad newspaper reporter, bad!)

This is a chunky thick book. It took me so long to read because I suffer from Good-writing-overloadis. You laugh. It's a miserable disease that prevents me from reading at lightening speed. Very frustrating. 

I perhaps lack the subtlety needed for a review of a poet's autobiography. I've never been much for poetry, except in a few exceptional instances. I have always deleted any poetry I attempted to write.

So, I've come in the project to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. An autobiography written in a poet's tongue. I feel my synapses burning already.

This book presents me with several challenges. For one it's a lot longer than anything I've read for the project up to this point. For another, it's an autobiography. Not a picture book, not, in my estimate, really a children's book. Angelou's prose style also resembles her poetry and seems to take its rhythm for most of the book from that.

A very young child, although the book is written in the voice of a child, would not grasp the theme of growing maturity and change that flows through the book.

I shall endeavor to do it justice.

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Review four: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelous

Most common bannings reasons: graphic account of the rape of a child, racism, crudity, sexual content, violence

Year Published: 1969 by Random House Inc. of New York

Length: 289 pages minus reviews and author biography

Awards won: Nominated for the National Book Award in 1970.

Eyebrow rating: Four raised brows for the graphic content and mature subject matter. Nobody's going to convince me the rape of a child, racism and teen pregnancy (just to name a few elements of Angelou's book) aren't going to break a scale.

Banning attempts:

- Just last month: Oct. 20, (tipping my hat to reporter Annie Burris here), a two school board trustees created public scene at the Huntington Beach City Council meeting in an attempt to get the book removed from local school libraries. For the full story, click here. Also, I just found the link to the video of the Oct. 19 city council meeting where the incident took place. Click here and you can see for yourself.

-Challenged in 2008 in the Manheim Penn. Public Schools and in 2007 in the Fond Du Lac Wisc. Public schools. Hat tip to the Marshall University Library page. For the full page, click here.

- One of the most commonly banned and challenged books since its publication. A perenial member of the American Library Association's most banned books list.

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I said above that I do not believe I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a children's book.

I would argue that this is a book suitable for those entering the teen years, from ages 12 to above.

The book includes Angelou's blunt handling of her own rape as a young girl, the racism that ran rampant in Stamps, Ark. where she grew up, and the loss of her virginity in San Francisco that comes near the end of the book. That results in a baby for someone who has just ending childhood herself.

I read the book as a seventh or eighth grader. I'm not sure I appreciated the finer points of what Angelou was trying to convey at that time. But it was probably a good introduction to more adult books (although I'd started reading Tom Clancy in the fourth grade).

Her voice, what I image to be a husky, full voice speaks to the child that still is curled with a book in a far corner of my heart.

There is a brutality to the way a child sees the world. And an innocence. I can hear the young Marguerite speaking as she describes the way her "Momma" handled the heckling of some white trash girls in front of her stores, the stoicism when she writes:

"But the big girl turned her back, bent down and put her hands flat on the ground ... She simply shifted her weight and did a handstand ... Her dress fell down around her shoulders, and she had on no drawers. The slick pubic hair made a brown triangle where her legs came together ... Momma changed her son to 'Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.' I found that I was praying too. How long could Momma hold out? What new indignity would they think of to subject her to?"

There are the good memories of church picnics, the hero-worship of a big brother, the longings for the fancy dress for graduation.

Somehow, although Angelou has the clarity of adulthood to comprehend the complexities of events, that understanding does not seep into her story telling to make her child's voice ring false.

If I at 24 years old (nearly 25) can here that, I can hardly think of a better book to take young adults through their own transformational experience.

The major fault I attribute to the book is that after moving at a deliberate pace through her earlier years Angelou takes us through her traumatic tennage years in California and the birth of her son at almost breakneck speed. Perhaps that's how it felt to her but it weakens the end of the book. She might have been better to bring it to an end sooner.

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In putting myself in the place of those with issues with the book, I won't disagree that parts of the book are difficult to read.

I believe Angelou's handling of her rape is not gratuatous. That she can articulate it so clearly from her eight year old self's vantage point - with its confusion, fear and guilt - is remarkable. Many grown women who suffer the horror of rape can't overcome those feelings enough to do what Angelou does.

It's still an ugly part of life that some parents would want to shield children from.

But, as I said, there is a brutality to childhood. A pity to be true. But true nonetheless.

Angelou's descriptions of the racism of Stamps' culture made me flinch several times. Possibly out of guilt by association as a white Midwesterner. Maybe just out of shear disgust. Can't be sure.

The Civil Rights Era and the treatment of African Americans prior to it still raises a lot of hackles. I won't begin to claim I can solve the feelings about race that churn under the country's facade. I am sure Angelou's depictions of the whites of Stamps would make even a number of mild mannered people today claim she was exaggerating or even perhaps racist herself.

With the level of content, race issues, violence, and sexual abuse in the book, I did raise my eyebrows a few times. That's why it's rated a four. Just because I understand the concerns.

Certainly not because I agree with them.

I'm a lot less conflicted in this review about my feelings than in the Heather Has Two Mommies post. (Thanks to all my thoughtful commentors!)

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Two things disturbed me during the process of coming u with this post. One has to do with what many I'm sure see as the desensitizing of our culture to violence and particularly sexual violence. The other to simple hypocrisy. Or at least what seems like simple hypocrisy.

Or maybe it's just the cheapening of the human experience thanks to the glut of "real" Confessions, Runaway Projects, Chefs trying to top each other with ever more bizarre food and You-tube live births.

I'm a little tired and cranky this morning. I'll have to start humming "Always Look on the Bright Side of Your Life."

To the first thing:

I was talking about my project and reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings while volunteering at my old high school. I was backstage, painting a "tapestry" with a particularly manly St. Michael casting Lucifer from the heavens at the time.

I was talking to one of the seniors whom I'd gotten to know during the work sessions.

She gagged visibly when I brought up the book.

"That bird needs to shut the hell up," the senior - henceforth known as Cordelia (not her real name) - barked.

I was surprised. Cordelia and I both attended an all girls' school bent on empowering women and crafting well-rounded female leaders. Angelou was among those authors always touted by my teachers.

I asked Cordelia with a startled chuckle to explain what she said. She cocked her head, crossed her arms, chewed on her lip a moment.

"Well, it's just a whole lot of whining. And I don't give a shit." None of this was said with malice.

Whining. That troubled me. Could discussing a racist culture and her own rape really be whining?

Ours is still not a culture that is overly supportive of rape victims. According to the National Organization for Women (NOW), about 600 women are raped a day. That statistic comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey. For the full report, click here.

Numerous rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.

I will not be so arrogant as to claim that I "know where a rape victim is coming from." I don't, thank God. I do pray that I never know that.

With so much media sensationalism, the growing visibility of porn, and even TV shows like Law and Order: SVU if we haven't become more hardened to rape. Or at least hardened to the point of callousness. I know the thoughtful writers at Salon's Broadsheet often tackle this same questions.

I still don't know what to think of Cordelia's sentiments.

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The final note I have on Angelou's book comes from the second thing that disturbed me.

That is the latest banning attempt in Orange County that I reference above.

School board trustee John Briscoe of the Ocean View School District and a former Westminster School District trustee Judy Aherns, staged a public demonstration at a city council meeting over the book, reading Angelou's rape scene as proof of why it should be banned.

Perhaps Briscoe and Aherns both hate The Real Housewives of Orange County but I'd argue the show set in their home county is a hell of a lot more damaging to a "helpless" (as Briscoe called the kids of the area's communities) child's mind than allowing eighth graders to read a thoughtful examination of childhood, trauma and hope.

At least the latter doesn't kill brain cells.

Bully for Huntington Beach Mayor Keith Bohr for not stopping the passage's reading after the pair warned of its "explicit nature." Seriously, Mr. Mayor, good for you.

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Tune in next time (hopefully a lot sooner next time) for a war over that sinful indulgence, chocolate. I've been doing National Novel Writing Month so that's been eating into my reading time. But, "A Year of Reading Dangerously" will carry on.

As always, read dangerously and, if you want to follow Mr. Briscoe's lead, read in public at a televised city council meeting!