Banned Books Reading
I checked out books from the American Libraries Association’s various lists of challenged and banned books.
- Lois Lowry’s The Giver
- A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
- Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
- Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland’s King & King and King & King & Family
I already read King & King and started reading The Giver. King & King tells the story of a queen who decides its time her son, the crown prince, gets married. She parades princess after princess before him until he falls in love with the brother of the last princess. ("The wedding was very special. The queen even shed a tear or two.") The illustrations are very neat. My favorite one is on about the seventh page of the book (the pages lack numbers) and shows all sorts of words and phrases about marriage, like "I do it for you," Traumhochzeit, "to care for," and "it is of the utmost importance."
I haven’t read very far into The Giver yet. I know a bit about it because some intellectual freedom classmates of mine read it for a class report. I’ve wanted to read it for a while and just haven’t. I saw the movie The Village tonight and thought it was interesting to learn in the same evening about two societies who have willingly separated themselves from the outside world.
My local library has a display for the week in the children’s section.
Jessamyn has a great post about a book frequently challenged because of its inaccuracies. She wonders whether it’s ever appropriate to challenge a book and whether librarians should do something to indicate the problems with this particular book. If we should do something as professionals to note the problems with this book, should we then also append notes to books with other inaccuracies or maybe those with outdated scientific research? It gets to be a complicated issue. It’s a good thing to ponder.
She also wonders why other Web sites that frequently have Banned Books Week materials don’t have anything up yet.
A search in Wikipedia for banned books landed me on a list of banned books with links to a number of unnamed resources.
