The Importance Of Banned Books Week

Celebrating Banned Books Week:

For decades, the Religious Right has used public school students as pawns in the "culture wars," fighting to impose a political agenda on textbooks and curricula in school districts across the country. This has included battles over sex education, school-led prayer, publicly funded vouchers for religious institutions, and shaping what children learn by controlling the content of textbooks and access to books in school libraries and classrooms. People For the American Way Foundation has a long record of resisting censorship and defending the freedom to learn.

People For the American Way Foundation is a sponsor of Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the freedom to read -- and an opportunity for readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, and First Amendment advocates to call for continued vigilance against efforts to restrict that freedom. This year’s Banned Books Week has a focus on Young Adult boos, which are challenged more frequently than any others.

Platt describes the importance of Banned Books Week at the Reading Rainbow blog:

Banned Books Week is celebrated each year because efforts are underway in many parts of this country to remove “offensive” materials from public libraries, school libraries, and classroom reading lists. Arguments can be made for involving parents in the education of their children, and giving them an opportunity to voice objections when some reading material runs counter to their own values, but problems arise when that parent wants to dictate what all children can or cannot read. In the Coda to Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury said: “There’s more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

I see a world with Crazy Christians running around with flamethrowers.

The Freedom To Read

Go to your local library and read a dirty book this week.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, Sept. 27 -  Oct. 3, 2015:

Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types –- in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.

First observed in 1982, Banned Books Week reminds Americans not to take the freedom to read for granted.  Since 1990, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom has received reports of 9,500 attempts to remove books deemed by some as inappropriate.

My guess is that the only people who would deem a book as inappropriate are religious people.

Banned Books Week

From Viva Banned Book Week by Nicole Belle:

That there is actually a week reserved for the championing of banned books, in America of all places, both saddens and heartens me. Saddens me because of the necessity, heartens me because it fights back against narrow-minded intolerance. This, then, the last week of September, from September 27th to October 4th, is Banned Books Week, a time when libraries and bookstores in every state put up displays of books to highlight the problem of censorship and celebrate our nation’s right to the freedom to read whatever we damned well please. Since Banned Book Week was launched in 1982, more than a thousand books have been under pressure by those who would suppress the works of my fellow novelists and writers, because of sexual content, or slang, or violence, or profanity, or racial or religious objections, or political issues; from time-honoured classics to trashy airport novels. In the top ten books to be challenged last year alone, it is absolutely ludicrous that one of them should be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Some of the books challenged bugger belief: An illustrated edition of Little Red Riding Hood was banned in two California school districts in 1989, because the book shows the heroine taking food and wine to her grandmother, the school board citing concerns about alcohol consumption by children. Roald Dahl’s wonderful classic James and the Giant Peach was removed from a school in Florida because it contained the word ‘ass’, and placed in restricted access in libraries in Virginia because the book encouraged children to ‘disobey their parents’. In Eureka, Illinois, Geoffrey Chaucer’s 600-year-old masterpiece, Canterbury Tales, was dropped from an advanced literature course in a senior preparatory high school class for… get this… objectionable ‘sexual content.’ How insane is that?

In Gainesville, Hall County, Georgia, the Chestatee Public Library board hadn’t even taken a final vote on whether or not to remove Nancy Friday’s Women on Top from the shelves when someone decided to take the matter into their own hands, borrowed it and ‘accidently’ destroyed it. The board did, however, vote not to replace it. Me, I’m tempted to send them a replacement copy, gratis.

It’s not just schools and libraries; bookstores are also deciding what you, the customer, should and should not be allowed to read. Tim C. Leedom’s The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You To Read was banned from Barnes & Noble in San Diego in 1995 because it was ‘too controversial for the bookstore’s conservative clientele.’

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