Ironic or Ridiculous?

VS.

The mother of a South Fork High School student has taken up a lost cause by trying to ban The Catcher in the Rye from the entire school district, states Eve Samples in an article on September 25th.  Of course, the mother didn't start the campaign the moment that her son brought home the book.  No, first of all she asked that he be able to read a different book, a request the school complied with.  Her son is now reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, book #14, on the ALA's most challenged books of the last decade.  Somehow it's better than Catcher because instead of using the "F" word and taking the Lord's name in vain, it only uses "nigger" upwards of 200 times.  I ask you, how is this considered a suitable replacement?  Not only that, but why, after giving her son a different text, is she now campaigning to remove Catcher from classrooms across the district?  In the article, Samples claims, "I doubt any supporter of the First Amendment would take up her cause."  I concur.  What do you think?

Banned Books Blog

Banned Books, a blog from the UK, has created a list of 50 books that are "mad, bad, and dangerous to read."  The books are divided into four main categories:


1) Corrosive to Young Minds
2) Politically Incendiary
3) Downright Sexy
4) Just Wrong



Check out these lists!  You can even take a quiz on the site, for fun.  Enjoy your Banned Books Week!

nifty little pictogram...

"Improper School Reading"

"Are these books not for our kids?  State ACLU issues list of what's been deemed improper school reading."  This is the headline of a recent article at Chron.com, written by Maggie Galehouse.  The article is quite enlightening.  Apart from just giving a list of books that some groups deem inappropriate for classrooms or for children, the article also gives some interesting facts and figures regarding the breakdown of how many books are challenged for specific reasons.

• Sex or nudity: 44

• Profane language: 29

• Violence and horror: 18

• Drugs and alcohol: 17

• Offensive to religious beliefs: 12

• Politically, socially, racially offensive: 11

• Other/No reason given: 14

I'm not really sure what's worse, the number of books banned for sex?  Or the number banned for "No reason given"?  In any case, Galehouse does a marvelous job covering book banning trends and notes:

To some extent, what gets banned or challenged depends on what's in fashion. In the past, Harry Potter books were challenged because of their focus on witchcraft. Similar cases were made against vampire books, although Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series was challenged by only one district in 2009-10.

Yet some topics always fall under scrutiny. This year, as in years past, some of the banned books have gay themes. [emphasis added]

This article, being from a Houston news site, covers only banned books in Texas, but it gives a good indication of the types of books being challenged and, as with the quote above, it still gives insight into the trends of book banning on a larger scale.  To finish off today's post, here is a list by the Texas ACLU of books removed from some library shelves or class reading lists in Texas in 2009-10, by author:

• Judy Blume: Forever ; Then Again, Maybe I Won't

• Jean Ferris: Eight Seconds

• Brian Innes: The History and Methods of Torture

• Mark Kidwell: The Creature From the Depths

• Denene Millner: Hotlanta

• Lauren Myracle: ttfn

• Phyllis Reynolds Naylor: Achingly Alice

• Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson: And Tango Makes Three

• Julie Anne Peters: Far From Xanadu

• Patricia Polacco: In Our Mothers' House

• Anne Rooney: Zombies on the Loose

• R.L. Stine: Eye Candy

• Time-Life Magazine

• Media: Tom Brown's Schooldays

• Allison Van Diepen: Snitch

• Jake Wizner: Spanking Shakespeare

• Cecily von Ziegesar: Would I Lie to You: A Gossip Girl Novel

Source: ACLU of Texas 

Banned Books Week!

Don't Forget!  Banned Books Week starts on Saturday, September 25th and goes until Saturday, October 2nd.  Check out readings lists at the American Library Association's website and have fun!  Go to your library and ask them if they have any banned books for you to check out and see what they have to offer.  It's fun, free, and you can sound like a total rebel when you talk to your friends... and without having to commit a crime!  Awesome, right?  Don't be a blue-eyed, angry robot...

Banning the Unwritten

While I don't like a lot of Vampire novels, I can see the appeal.  What I do not understand, however, are a number of issues related to the banning of the Vampire Academy series.  Firstly the idea of nudity in a novel is very difficult for me to wrap my head around as nudity, in my mind, necessitates a visual image.  Certainly one could identify descriptive language as sexual or explicit, but as nudity?  Secondly, the Stephenville Independent School District banned the whole series.  The catch?  They haven't all been written yet.  As it says in Robert P. Doyle's Banned and Challenged Books 2009-2010, “Stephenville ISD actually banned books that have not yet been published and perhaps even books that have yet to be written. There is no way the district could know the content of these books, and yet they have been banned.”  Certainly quite a feat!

Closure of Russian Archives

Ruth Derksen Siemens brought attention to a somewhat distressing situation in Russia when she released an email that describes limitations in the Russian archives.  It is now impossible to access information on an event or person until 75 years later.  These limitations were put in place in 2006.  A gathering of scholars at the 4^th International Scholarly Conference on Germans of Siberia: History and Culture, in Omsk, released a plea to the Russian government asking for the archives to be reopened.  The strangest part of this whole situation is how quietly it happened.

Strangely, this restriction escaped the notice of mainstream media, international universities and many scholars. Since 2006, researchers searching the archives of the former Soviet Union can only access documents 75 years after an event has occurred. This is disturbing and distressing. Records of events that occurred after 1935 cannot be examined. The letters from the Regehr family stopped in 1937. What happened when the letters stopped? Why did they stop? Which political and ideological forces affected the letter writers? Why cannot I (or other researchers) explore archival documents that would assist me to understand the silence? (Quotation from Ruth's Email)

Now, let's look back at all the censorship issues going on in North America.  Let's think about how easy it would be to implement systems that would limit the amount of information available to the public and to academics for research purposes.  This incident with the Russian archives is very unfortunate and needs to be dealt with, and so do instances of censorship and withheld information in North America.  Help fight for the rights of people to read what they want to read in Libraries and Classrooms.  Help researchers and institutions keep archives open and available.  Let's keep information available to everyone. 

Are you with me?