Do you remember the first time that you read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird? How about Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or any one of Stephen King’s long list of spine-tinglers? Oh, and when you were a kid, did you enjoy the popular Where’s Waldo? series, Thomas Rockwell’s hilarious book, How to Eat Fried Worms, Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time,?
Well, according to some people, those books are just too dangerous to be read.
Here on campus, the Sherrod Library has been celebrating “Let Freedom Read! Banned Books 2002,” along with libraries and bookstores across the country. Although the nationalcelebration took place from Sept. 21-28, the Sherrod Library’s display has been extended an extra week and will end on Oct. 6.
If you wander into the library this week, andI hope you do, there is a bulletin board with pictures of various faculty members and students reading their favorite banned or challenged books above a rack of the so-deemed suspicious literature. You can’t miss it. It’s right next to the bottom of the staircase, just past the reference desk.
And if you’d like to learn more about why the books were banned/challenged, mosey on over to the reference desk, and they’ll be happy to let you peruse the “Banned Books: 2000 Resource Book,” which has the complete lowdown on why and where people have tried to keep the door to imagination and learning locked shut. It even has a list and description of some notable First Amendment court cases.
When a book is challenged, it means that there have been complaints about the book’s material and it has been reviewed for its possible removal.
Once it is decided to give it the boot, it is deemed a “banned” book, although bans have been overturned when the ban has become outdated or enough opposition has been voiced.
Carol Norris, the library’s associate professor, Kathy Campbell, the assistant professor, and numerous others took part in putting this project together. Jeff Sizemore took photos as the media center assistant, and Rebecca Tolley-Stokes conjured up a web site.
While it has been an exhausting project, Norris hopes that next year there will be “more student involvement, and that it will be an annual event here. We have to apologize to the colleges that we missed – we wanted to be able to represent everyone. We are very appreciative of those who took the time to become involved, and there were plenty of others that volunteered to help but time did not allow for all of them.”
It looks good to me, time crunch or no.
The most frequently challenged books of 2001 (out of 448 recorded challenges) are: (1) the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for its focus on wizardry and magic; (2) Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, for offensive language and age unsuitability; (3); The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for the same reason; (4) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence, and age unsuitable; (5) Summer of my German Soldier, by Bette Green, for same offenses; (6) The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger for offensive language and age unsuitability; (7) Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for being sexually explicit, offensive language and drug use; (8) Go Ask Alice, Anonymous, for same; (9) Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, for offensive language and being unsuited to an age group, and lastly, (10) Blood and Chocolate, by Annette Curtis Klause, for being sexually explicit and age unsuitability.
I rather happened to love Blood and Chocolate. It was one of my favorite books that I read in high school.
Don’t tell the censor-hungry of America that. Can you imagine what we’d be left with in our libraries if we banned every book that had curse words, sexually explicit scenes, or controversial religious/social issues? Dear God, we can only read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so many times.
Oh, wait a minute. That one was banned at one point in time, too. So why in the world would anyone take offense at the children’s book, James and the Giant Peach?
Hm. I guess you’ll have to come check it out for yourselves. I can’t tell you everything.
I leave you with a blip taken from the American Library Association web site in Septemer 2002:
“The ability to read, speak, think and freely express ourselves are core American values. In the post 9-11 environment, Ameri-cans of all ages and backgrounds are rediscovering the meaning of words like democracy, freedom, citizenship and community. Now, more than ever,we must let freedom read.”For more information on Banned Books Week, please visit http://www.ala.org/bbooks/.

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