underdogishere

Banned Books Week began this weekend! Now this is my idea of a holiday.

Librarians, of course, stand at the forefront of those who battle censorship, and the American Library Association, one of the sponsors of Banned Books Week, keeps a top ten list, and you can see 2009's here. A great deal has been made this year of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a perennial among banned books, and it's still up there and going strong. And other books that appear year after year are still secure in their places: And Tango Makes Three, Catcher in the Rye, and The Color Purple. The Harry Potter series has dropped off, replaced, perhaps, by the Twilight series. And I'm sure the ghost of Mark Twain is disappointed to find that Huckleberry Finn didn't make the cut this year.

All of which leads me to wonder why certain books make the coveted top ten, while others do not. For example, why not Their Eyes Were Watching God? All The Kings Men? (All The Kings Men, by the way, was required reading when I was a sophomore in high school. When the teacher assigned it, he remarked that it was "intense," but he "hoped" it wouldn't be "too much" for us.)

Anyway, back to which books make the list: Clearly, books are more frequently targets of censorship when they are more frequently read. Hence To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and the replacement of Potter with Twilight. But some of the others... why them and not others? And Tango Makes Three? Lauren Myracle's Internet Girl series?

I've been analyzing the lists from recent years, and I'm pretty sure that if you can't write a blockbuster like Catcher in the Rye, but you still want to make the most-censored top ten, you should chose one of these two meal tickets: (1) Write about homosexuality, or (2) write realistically about young adults, especially girls, maturing (while Judy Blume never made the top ten list with a single book, five of her books made the list of top one-hundred challenged books of the decade of the 1990's, which makes her a rock star among the censored). If you want to really stack your deck, you should write realistically about about young lesbian girls maturing. If the young adult lesbians are realistically witches or vampires, I don't think that would hurt.

Barring that, writing a story that portrays Christianity in a bad light is as good fallback.

Happy Banned Books Week everyone! Read a book!

Labels: Banned Books Week, Writing

What can I say? It's been a very, very busy past two weeks at work. Is that the reason? Whatever it is, I missed Banned Books Week this year. It ends today. How could I let this happen? I love Banned Books Week. Anyway, here's my belated post for Banned Books Week, 2009:

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To those who are active for a cause -- civil rights, the environment, abortion rights, heck, even anti-abortion rights -- it's often a point of pride to be arrested and convicted in the service of the cause. Recently the mayor of some Southern city offered a pardon to any activist convicted of a crime during the Civil Rights movement: They only had to ask and their record would be wiped clean. Almost no one asked. That conviction that comes up during every background check isn't something to be ashamed of. It's a badge of honor. I've even heard of parties thrown for activists when they reach a milestone -- say, twenty five, or even fifty, arrests and convictions.

If an activist takes pride in the number of his or her convictions, then for a "banned" book the measure of pride must be the number of times that someone asks to have it stricken from a library's shelves. Did you know that And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, has been the book most requested to be banned for...

...three straight years.

Truly a badge of honor.

And there's one more great reason for me to recommend And Tango Makes Three: If, like me, you blew off Banned Books Week until the last minute this year... it's an illustrated childrens book, so it won't take you any time to read. You can still squeak in under the deadline.

Labels: Banned Books Week

Here we are three days into the event, and I haven't even wished everyone Happy Banned Books Week! Yes, it's Banned Books Week 2008! Time for all of us to read a banned book. Or more than one. You have lots of great choices: Just from the list of those suffering banning or attempted banning in the past year, there's the entire Harry Potter opus; Alice Walker's The Color Purple; that perennial favorite among censors, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (number four on the top-ten list, and I suspect old Sam Clemens would be tickled pink); John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird; and Richard Wright's Black Boy.

My personal recommendation for 2008? Felice Newman's The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us. Because even if you aren't a lesbian, you are one of "All of Us."

In any event, Banned Books Week runs through next Saturday, so stand up for freedom of expression! And stand up to the censors.

Labels: Banned Books Week, Gender Issues

As the U.S. careens to the political right, it's important to celebrate the now-diminishing freedoms and rights that were handed down to us by the founding fathers. And in that spirit, let's hear a big Yay! for Banned Books Week, which is this week!

Clicking the ALA's official Banned Books Week Web Badge, above or to the left (depending on your browser), will take you to the ALA's Banned Books Week resource page, which is chock full of links, like this one which is to Google's list of books that have been banned, or that people have tried to ban. It still amazes me every time I hear that people are trying to ban Judy Blume's wonderful books.

The ALA would like you to display their Web Badge on your blog, too. You can read about it here. If you need a place to host the gif file, you can link to my copy. It's at http://beaglewriter.com/blog/images/bannedbooksweek.gif.

And I love the name of this web site:

Delete Censorship

Labels: Banned Books Week