Summary
Some of them were old friends, including two by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison ("The Bluest Eye" and "Beloved") and "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier. The top contender was new to me but it sounds like fun: "And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell is a children's book "about two male penguins parenting an egg from a mixed-sex penguin couple," according to an ALA press release. I checked the Monroe County Library Web site and four of our five branches have it, all copies checked in, waiting to be read.
Whenever I hear of an attempt to ban a book I wonder if the would-be banners have ever met a kid, or have entirely forgotten what it was like to be a kid. Don't they know that forbidding something increases its allure exponentially? And why do they think that reading is such a potentially dangerous activity? I got into a battle royal with a teacher in second grade because she didn't think I was old enough to read "Caddie Woodlawn," hardly a challenging or overmature book. Fortunately for me, my grandmother was a librarian who thought different and I was allowed to check out the book. (This was the same library, though a few years later and not with my grandmother behind the desk, where I used to sneak into the stacks to read [Judy Blume]'s "Wifey." As you can tell, it turned me into a depraved maniac.)See the full content of this document
Extract
Reading Is Fundamental ... To Our Freedom
Hooray! It's Banned Books Week! OK, that does sound a bit weird. But we're not celebrating banned books here. We - or more accurately the American Library Association and a bunch of other groups - are celebrating the freedom to read, one...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
