Hey Kids -- It's Banned Books Week. With all the incredibly bad other shit that's going on right now, the fact that Native Son, Slaughterhouse Five, Beloved, and hundreds of other important works are still getting knocked around almost slips right by you.
Say what you want about the librarians, but they do not take any shit on this matter. The American Library Association has loads of information on their site, including this list of the 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990 -- 2000.
9.29.2005
Banned Books Week
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2 comments:
ahhhh, Slaughterhouse Five is banned by someone??
For a while, I'd thought my love of Vonnegut was due to the fact that every adolescent boy who reads loves Vonnegut at some point, but I've just begun re-reading him, and it's freakin brilliant.
On the surface it looks so simplistic, almost like it's a fable... but it's far from it.
The problem is, most of these jackasses either don't read the books, or they're too dense to understand anything about them-- that's the only way someone could possibly think it's a bad thing for a young person to read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," or "Huckleberry Finn."
And Lord of the Flies too? What the hell's wrong with that? It's not like it encourages children to slaughter each other; it's just a (frighteningly accurate, given the aftermath of Katrina) view of humanity if it were to live in an unstructured life.
It's shit like this that makes my students ignorant of everything by the time they get to college, so I have to explain to them that racism didn't just end after MLK got shot, or describe to them who and what the Nazis were.
God damnit, if i keep going, my brain's going to leak out my ears.
so it goes.
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