Banned books find welcome shelf space at the Nook

Growing up, Luka Weinberger didn’t see themselves in the children’s books that graced the shelves in the family’s home – a reality that reinforced in the artist the powerful impact that this kind of representation can have on a person.

“When you see yourself, you definitely feel less alone. You feel like you have a script now to advocate for yourself and to ask questions instead of letting yourself become invisible,” Weinberger said in late September outside of Third Way Coffee House, where their latest venture, the Nook, is set to open with a kickoff celebration starting at noon on Saturday, Sept. 28. “I can only speak about my own experiences growing up in a single-parent household in a community where single moms were not a thing. And growing up knowing I was queer, knowing I was trans, but not having the words for it, and not even knowing what it really was [to be trans]. But if I had seen a book that showed two dads with their kids trying to bathe a cat, maybe I would have felt like, oh, this is normal. This is a normal thing I can talk about. This is a normal thing I can advocate for myself about. And if I see a book where they discuss it so beautifully, and where they make it so accessible, then maybe I can find a way to talk to a friend or a teacher or a guardian and get it out of my brain. Because when things like this stay in your brain, you feel shame, you feel resentment. And then you start to close off whole parts of yourself.”

This, Weinberger continued, can have tragic consequences on a person, with the artist describing childhood as a point in time when “everything is lit up.” If this flame is nourished and tended to, they said, kids are better able to grow into the kindest, silliest, most open and compassionate versions of themselves.

In the last few years, however, conservatives have launched an all-out assault on this type of representation in literature, with a growing movement to ban books from schools and public libraries taking root in 2021 and continuing unabated through this year. The free speech advocacy group PEN America recently reported that more than 10,000 books were banned by public schools in the 2023-24 academic year – nearly triple the amount documented in 2022-23.

More often than not, these challenged books center on Black and Brown people and the queer community, with Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association, telling Axios in April that “it’s obvious that the pressure groups are targeting books about LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.”

Columbus author Ashley Hope Perez, whose young adult novel Out of Darkness ranked as one of the most-challenged books of 2021, told me in a 2022 interview that conservative groups would often take aim at books by and about minority groups but focus their messaging on a text’s so-called “sexual content” as a means of deflection.

“People will send me screenshots from these parent Facebook groups, and they’re explaining, ‘When you make your comment at the school board meeting, don’t say LGBTQ, don’t talk about race. You have to focus on the sexual content if you want to get rid of these bad books,’” Perez said. “But that language is being used over and over as a cover. These groups have basically just taken lists designed to help diversify offerings in libraries and in school curriculum and turned those into targeted books.”

With the Nook, funded by a grant from GCAC and completed with the assistance of Columbus woodworker Hannah Parker, who built the shelves, Weinberger wanted to focus on these challenged books, creating an outdoor space where neighborhood children could have access to reading materials that might no longer be available in their school libraries. These include books such as New Kid, by illustrator and Cartoon Crossroads Columbus special guest Jerry Craft, poetry collections by Shel Silverstein and children’s books such as And Tango Makes Three, the illustrated tale of two male penguins who make a family with the help of a zookeeper. There are also illustrated books about Palestine and others that introduce concepts such as abolition, mutual aid and restorative justice, including Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

“Kids need these books, so they will be here,” said Weinberger, who added that the collection at the Nook is intended to be permanent, with all of the materials remaining on site rather than operating on the take-a-book-leave-a-book model familiar to Little Free Libraries.

“Some people started doing that, but they were leaving like V.C. Andrews and John Grisham, which is not the vibe I was going for,” they said, and laughed.

A handful of the books come direct from Weinberger’s collection, including the His Dark Materials series, while the remainder were purchased by the artist on discount from local indies such as Prologue Bookshop, Gramercy Books and Bookspace Columbus. The Nook, which is expected to remain open during regular Third Way hours, is also outfitted with a couch and some chairs and incorporates a playful mural by Weinberger of a Pinocchio-like wooden figure seated on a tree stump and reading from a glowing book. 

As with the collected materials housed in a pair of shelves bookending the painting, the mural itself also incorporates a story, Weinberger unraveling a tale in which a wooden doll falls from a delivery truck and stumbles into a forest where he discovers an untended pile of reading material.

“And so, he starts reading, and as he reads, he starts growing and changing and becoming something different,” the artist said, the character’s transformation evident in everything from the fresh growth sprouting all over his body to the pearlescent quality of his eyes. “You can see he’s really coming alive.”