It’s Banned Books Week – September 29 – October 6, 2007. Hat tip to Bitchery reader Lucinda for reminding me.
So! In honor of Banned Books Week, we open the floodgates! Check out the list of 100 Most Challenged Books from 1990 to 2000. If you like, submit a review of one of the books, up to 500 words, and we’ll post them throughout the week. Please feel free to include your name, a URL to your site, and any information about yourself and when you read the book as part of your “bio,” up to 50 words.
If you loved it, great. If you hated it but still defend your right to read it, even better! Get creative, and we’ll vote on the best one once they’re all posted. Prizes? Of course there will be prizes! Stay tuned!
EDITED TO ADD: Please email your reviews to candy @ smartbitchestrashybooks.com and sarah @ smartbitchestrashybooks.com and we’ll start putting them up on the site. Please also tell us what name you’d like us to use to credit your review.
A banned-book related confession: I found Annie on My Mind in the library when I was a young teenager. I stole it instead of checking it out, because I was terrified of what would happen if anyone caught me with it. (My mother really is a lovely person, but she was religiously strict and conservative.)
I need to find a way to make amends with the library since I still feel awfully guilty 15+ yrs later about The Theft. This book, though, added so much to my budding broader & healthier view of what’s possible in life, and I never would have been exposed at that age to such an uncontrived, wholesome teen love story about two girls if the public library hadn’t had it on the shelf. (Just wish I’d known then that it would’ve been perfectly safe to simply check the book out.)
Anyway, on behalf of questing teenagers everywhere, cheers (& apologies!) to the King County Library System for upholding intellectual freedom!
Actually, even when I was five, I understood Sambo is a masterful piece of passive-aggressive, anti-white literature. Being, however, a very small, picked on child, I found the idea of my tormentors running themselves into butter for my ultimate profit and gain just too, too amusing to offend me. 🙂
The only one on the list I agree with is Of Mice And Men, and that’s because I had to read the damn thing FOUR DAMN TIMES in the course of my education. I didn’t like it on first reading, and subsequent readings didn’t endear it to me. Nowadays, all you have to say is “Steinbeck” and I start to foam at the mouth. Between OMAM and The Pearl, I can’t believe I left high school sane for the massive hate-on I have for Steinbeck.
After that feeble instroduction to “literature” *snort*, I flee in the other direction as quickly as possible when a book gets that designation. As far as I can tell, literature is a massive downer and babies get thrown off cliffs at the end, so screw it. :-p
I’m proud to say that my grade five teacher read both A Wrinkle in Time and A View from the Cherry Tree to us and they are still two of my favourites.
Yes, there are books that aren’t appropriate for little kids – that’s why they are in the teen or adult sections of the library! What ever happened to parental supervision???
When I was a kid my mom monitored what I read and told me when she thought I was old enough to venture into the adult section. I still had to vet all my books through her until I was about 15 or 16.
Though, she did once bring me home an innocent enough looking book (something about an albino boy and a circus, it was 25 years ago)with a horribly vivid sex scene that ripped out a huge chunk of my childish innocence and left me scarred for life.
I never told her about it. Still gives me the creeps.
There was a book of horror stories edited by (I think) Jane Yolen that had one story I still can’t read.
It’s not my place to say that just because something squicks me it should be banished to the outer realms. Not my place at all.
I’m working a fund-raiser for my library this weekend, I think I’m going to check out a banned book.