It's Like Farenheit 451 All Over Again...
This week is Banned Book Week. For those of you who are wondering what that means, it's a week that celebrates those books that have either been banned or challenged in American libraries. The American Library Association has a website with a list of the top 100 most challenged books from 1990-1999. While I have never been a fan of censorship, there were some books on there that did not surprise me. Let me say that while I find some material objectionable, I believe that those materials should still be available to the public in the library, as even objectionable content can have important ideas. But I digress. What shocked me were how so many of the books listed were fixtures of my elementary school life. For instance, The Giver, My Brother Sam is Dead, Julie of the Wolves, and many others were actually required reading for my grade school classes. In hindsight, I cannot think of a single book that I read as a child that did not either provoke thought or entertain me. Furthermore, many of the challenged books are also modern classics of literature that are not without value. To attempt to ban them simply because one finds them distasteful would be a travesty against freedom of expression. Okay, there's my soapbox speech for the day. Carry on with the rest of your lives, my friends.