“Read A Book”

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Welcome to banned book week. Please read a book or two from the list.

Some of them I do not understand. Some of them, I have never heard of before and had to look up on Amazon. A few comments:

A few of the books I can logically see why they might be inappropriate for schools: the Madonna pictographic Sex book and The Anarchist's Cookbook, for instance.

The Chocolate War: about a kid who would not sell chocolate for a school club. Oh, no–no political agenda there. We don't want to give kids the idea that they have the option NOT to sell candy for the school.

Various kid's horror stories: As I understand it, they are not too much different than spooky campfire stories. “When they got home, they found a MEAT HOOK embedded in the side of the car!”

Various social books: Daddy's Roommate, Heather has Two Mommies, My Brother Sam is Dead, etc. These seem like they should be available to anyone who wants (or NEEDS) them. Although it seems to me that kid that might be in a situation where they would NEED a book about a gay family probably has an open enough home life that they could talk to their parents about it (and probably already have the book and do not need it from the library). On the other hand, those books should be available for anyone who might be interested.

Harry Potter: HUH?! These are best-sellers and pretty well written children's books. “NOTHING WITH OCCULT THEMES FOR YOU, LITTLE JOHNNY!” While we're at it, let's ban Dungeons and Dragons and prevent all kids from watching reruns of Bewitched on Nick At Night.

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn: Nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. I would be willing to bet kids hear more of “the N-word” from rap music than they would from these books. Actually, I never got around to reading these and probably will do so soon.

A Wrinkle in Time: I loved this book as a kid! This is one of the first books that actually started me thinking about the forth dimension and physics.

Lord of the Flies: Why wasn't this banned at my school? They forced me to read it. I do not remember whether I actually did do so, or just bought the Cliff Notes. Maybe I'll just look up my junior-high teacher and bash his head in with a rock. Well, maybe not–he was a really cool Englishman, despite the toupee.

Posted in: Books

3 thoughts on ““Read A Book””

    1. EEEEEeeeenteresting. Yeah, I think this is one of the posts I had on LiveJournal way back when. I’ve been meaning to write a plugin to link back to the LJ page (or, at least, the post date) of where a post came from because comments do not get imported (and because LJ had some other nifty post features like embedded polls that don’t import). One of these days…

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