Banned Book Week!

Celebrate Banned Book week!

This week is the official Banned Book Week. Celebrate by reading some good books, or even buying t-shirts and other fun stuff from the American Library Association. Google has teamed up to offer information about the event as well as additional contacts to get involved. In particular, learn how to fight censorship in your libraries!

To get an idea of exactly what people are still trying to ban, here are some samples of challenges to books (taken from The Forbidden Library)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne Frank. Modern Library. Challenged in Wise County, Va. (1982) due to "sexually offensive" passages. Four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of this book because it is a "real downer."

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald Dahl. Bantam; Knopf; Penguin. Removed from a locked reference collection at the Boulder, Colo. Public Library (1988), where it had been placed because the librarian thought the book espoused a poor philosophy of life.

oh the irony

Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury. Ballentine. Ironically, students at the Venado Middle School in Irvine, Calif. received copies of the book with scores of words--mostly "hells" and "damns"--blacked out. The novel is about book burning and censorship. Thankfully, after receiving complaints from parents and being contacted by reporters, school officials said the censored copies would no longer be used (1992)

Of everything I learned while reading for this post, this quote, by one of our fairly recent presidents was most surprising.

Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America.

—Dwight David Eisenhower

From the remarks of the President of the United States at the Dartmouth College Commencement, June 14, 1953. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

Now, I don't quite agree with his views on communism being "almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions" but heck, this is still pretty impressive to me.

So, get out there and read! Vote! And laugh hysterically at people who want to ban books about banned books being burned during banned book week!