Titles. They can refer to a person (royalty, professions, national leaders), a property (real estate, vehicles, boats), and probably most frequently to a work of art (books, songs, movies, etc.). An interesting detail of copyright law: titles are NOT copyright protected. This sometimes leads to confusion.

 

I know some of you folks out there in Reader Land have followed my current extra-curricular literary project, reading the Banned Book list. You may or may not have noticed that my most recent BB review post (on my Facebook page) was Melissa, by Alex Gino, in late May.

 

Now that you mention it- –

 

What happened? Did you quit?

 

No, 9, I did not quit. I reserved a copy of the next book on the list,  Looking for Alaska, at the local library, and started reading.

 

 

 

 

Okay, it took me a couple of weeks to get started, and it was an unusually long book for this particular list. In fact, I immediately wondered why it was on the list at all. The author, Peter Jenkins, is a travel writer who made his initial splash with his nonfiction book, A Walk Across America, in 1979. Looking for Alaska came out in 2001. It’s about what happened when he and his family decided to uproot themselves from the east coast and live in Alaska for a year, to see what it was like.

 

Are there teenagers in his book?

 

Or little kids?

 

 

He has several children. One of them came with he and his wife and others visited them during the summer. But it was mostly about Alaska itself- -the geography, the wildlife, the tribes, the ongoing dangers of living in such an untamed place. I don’t investigate why the books on the list are banned before I read them, as I want to read without preconceived notions. This time, unlike every other book on the list so far, I couldn’t figure out who would ban this book, or why.

 

Being a fiction writer, I tried out several theories:

 

Maybe it was the sheer violence of nature that parents objected to? There is a graphically detailed account from a man who’d been attacked by a brown bear and survived, including the horrors experienced through all his senses when the bear crunched his head in its mouth.

 

Maybe it was the part about the native populations being colonized and practically put out of cultural existence by resource-grabbing whites? The poverty, alcoholism and depression, not to mention the complicity of the colonizers, which is not a popular topic with the book banning crowd?

 

Maybe it was concern for children’s physical well-being? The book is over 500 pages long and the hardback I borrowed was quite heavy.

 

That last one is a stretch.

 

 

You can see how desperate I was to figure it out, Lily. But then, I remembered that copyright protection doesn’t cover titles.

 

So. . .wait, I almost have it- –

You reserved the wrong book?

 

Exactly. When I looked back at the Banned Book list, I realized what I really wanted was Looking for Alaska by John Green (© 2005)! This was second on the list when I did a new search of the library’s online catalog. I reserved it and happily returned the other book by that title. The cover, featuring what looks like cigarette smoke, made much more sense for the genre than the one on Peter Jenkins’s book (half of the head of someone wearing a fur-lined parka).

 

 

 

In Green’s book, classified as YA Fiction, Alaska is a girl, not a place. It runs a little over 200 pages. I finished it in three nights. A review will appear at my Facebook page soon!

 

Lily, 9, what have we learned from this literary misstep?

 

That you can’t judge a book by its title.

 

But you can kind of figure out something about a book from its cover?

 

Excellent observations, to which I will add: When you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, look a little closer before you leap.