WC invites you to help celebrate Banned Books Week, September 22-28, 2013. It’s easy to do. Just read one of the Top 10 Banned Books in the United States. Here’s the list for 2012:
- Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey.
Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.
Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group - Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher.
Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group - Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James.
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit - And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
Reasons: Homosexuality, unsuited for age group - The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
Reasons: Homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit - Looking for Alaska, by John Green.
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group - Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: Unsuited for age group, violence - The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit - Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Reasons: Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence
You don’t have to read them all, although they are all fine books. Just one, maybe two.
For bonus points, you can ask your friends to join you. Because the way to deal with those who would ban books is to encourage as many people as possible to read them.
For still more bonus points, visit the Banned Books Week YouTube Channel. Participants can submit either a reading, or a description of a local book challenge.
And lest you think this is all hypothetical, the Randolph County School District, in North Carolina, recently banned Ralph Ellison’s classic, The Invisible Man. The 1953 National Book Award winning novel. The novel that Modern Library ranked as the 19th best English language novel of the 20th Century.
WC urges you to participate. The fundamentalist bookburners need to understand that the majority oppose their myopic anti-intellectualism.
Wickersham's Conscience 
Books were my salvation when I was a kid. It was the way I could literally escape my less than great home life. They taught me different cultures, languages, ways of thinking and being. And that is why books are considered “dangerous” by some – those who abhor change / anything different or a challenge to mind sets.
Now as to the list above, 50 shades of grey just is a bad book, and should be “banned” for its writing alone! LOL! I can’t understand how it got such good reviews. If you want a good soft S&M book go for Ann Rice writing under the pseudonym Roqueclaire, or great the fantasy series by Jacquelin Carey. As for other banned books, Anne Frank and Harry Potter are two of my favorites.
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I would heartily disagree that #4 is a fine book…otherwise, no quibbles.
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