Reflections on book bans
In honor of Banned Books Week, I made a little LibraryThing widget to display banned books from my own collection:
I used Wikipedia’s list of banned and challenged books as a quick reference. Looking over the list, I recognized quite a few books I loved when I was growing up. It made me wonder if the children’s librarian at my neighborhood public library — whom I remember with great fondness as one of the first people outside my family who let me know it was okay to be a bookwormish nerdy kid — ever had to deal with the "Won’t someone please think of the children?" type of book-banners. I hope she didn’t. (I can’t believe people have tried to ban the Anastasia Krupnik books; they were some of my favorite reading material in fifth grade. Zilpha Keatley Snyder‘s books, too.)
My "banned books" tag set isn’t very extensive, but I’ve read quite a few of the books on the various banned book lists. It occurred to me that I didn’t own a lot of these books because I’ve been able to borrow them from libraries instead of buying them. Which is a good thing to realize this week.
So: happy Banned Books Week! Now go forth and read something controversial.
Amanda, here’s my contribution. 😉
Go BBW!!!