Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Happy Reading
This week is Banned Books Week. In its honor, everyone should try and read at least one book that has been banned at some point. To help with your reading selection, here is the list of the 100 most challenged books of the 1990s. It's not that they were necessarily written in the '90s. It was just that people decided they hated them in the '90s. So have fun taking a stand against censorship.
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9 comments:
There's a lot of good books on there! But, to be fair, I read A Wrinkle in Time as a kid and it permanently scarred me. I'm messed up, really messed up...
What?? Why?? I love a Wrinkle in Time.
I don't think this book has been banned, but it probably should be:
http://tinyurl.com/ywxt7s
I've read 13 of the books on the list. Do I win?
I've read exactly half of them (most of them, actually, in my elementary school library on the beanbag chairs). I think the problem is that some of the best books for kids have content that makes them question things, and parents get really disturbed by this. We all read things before we were ready to understand it; that's how you get to be able to understand it. My Brother Sam is Dead, which in retrospect is a perfectly good Revolutionary War book, TERRIFIED me as a child, but it also made me face the horrible realities of war -- people die, and sometimes they're people one cares about.
I (and of course, this is from the perspective of not having any children of my own) am a little bit scared at how much we sanitize children's lives in some respects, and not in others. We don't like it when their books deal with death and loss, but Libby Lou's dresses them up like prostitutes, and that's culturally acceptable? (Actually, I suppose the correct term is "prosti-tots"). Does it really seem to anyone that children are going to be more disturbed in the long run by reading a book about the loss of a loved one, or about living in the wild among wolves, or about witnessing a murder and trying to figure out who did it, than by watching endless episodes of "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody," where decadent living and over-consumption are valorized, and eight-year-olds pretend that they're adults and ask other eight-year-olds out on dates (which involve, just to be clear, limo rides, dinner, a show, and soda drunk out of champagne flutes)? I think not.
Pardon the rant; I'm disturbed that books get banned and these banal, mind-numbing television programs get awards.
That is sort of the point of Banned Books Week - to highlight the ridiculum (I know that's a made up word, but it serves my purpose) of banning books. Since after all, opening our minds up to new ideas could be dangerous. And that could lead to thinking and imagination. Oh the horror of it all.
Just as another viewpoint, while I have read a bundle of those books, I dont think that kids necessarily need to be able to read anything. That being said, I am not going to dress my kids up like prostitots (PS I love that term). Not everyone who thinks that banning books is a good idea also dresses up their kids in hooker clothes, or lets them watch those mind numbing shows. You can pick and choose.
That being said, in my opinion some of the greatest kids books of all time are on that list. Bridge to terabitia, wrinkle in time, harry potter, etc. My problem is, with the abundance of great literature out there, kids and adolescents dont need to be forced to read crap for school. For that reason I think some books should not be included in the required curiculum.
Right, I wasn't suggesting that it was ban books or sell your children as sex slaves. I was objecting to a culture that could do both. I want ideological coherency!
And I don't think that kids should be allowed to read anything they want to; I just think that a lot of these books are really good books with challenging themes that children should read. Because of they aren't challenged to think about things when they're children and are going to ask their parents to help sort out big questions, what are they going to do when life challenges them to think? It's the same reason I object to conservative Christians who homeschool their children so their kids won't be exposed to the liberal curriculum in the public school. We had one of the products of that upbringing on our floor freshman year of college. She got pregnant. I guess I think part of parents' responsibility to their children is to make sure that they learn how to deal with things that don't fit into their moral/ideological outlook before sending them out into the world.
Sex by Madonna should be banned. Its stupid and it makes people stupider.
A Wrinkle in Time was weird...I think I had strange dreams after reading that one fifteen or twenty years ago.
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