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'Banned Books Week' Recognizes 2016's Most-Censored Books (and Comic Books) (newsweek.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek:
The American Library Association's yearly Banned Books Week, held this year between Sunday September 24 and Saturday September 30, is both a celebration of freedom and a warning against censorship. Launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, the event spotlights the risk of censorship still present... "While books have been and continue to be banned, part of the Banned Books Week celebration is the fact that, in a majority of cases, the books have remained available. This happens only thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, students, and community members who stand up and speak out for the freedom to read," the ALA stated.
"This Banned Books Week, we're asking people of all political persuasions to come together and celebrate Our Right to Read," says a coalition supporting the event. The ALA reports that half of the most frequently challenged books were in fact actually banned last year, according to the library group's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which calculates there were 17% more attempts to censor books in America in 2016. The five most-challenged books all contained LGBT characters, and the most common phrase used to complain about books is "sexually explicit," the OIF told Publisher's Weekly -- perhaps reflecting a change in targets. He believes one reason is that most challenges now are reported not for books in the library but against books in the advanced English curricula of some schools. This change also represents a shift upward in the age of the readers of the most challenged books. "We've moved from helicopter parenting, where people were hovering over their kids, to Velcro parenting," LaRue says. "There's no space at all between the hand of the parent and the head of the child. These are kids who are 16, 17; in one year they're going to be old enough to sign up for the military, get married, or vote, and their parents are still trying to protect them from content that is sexually explicit. I think that's a shift from overprotectiveness to almost suffocating."
Three of the 10 most-challenged books were graphic novels, so the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is sharing their own list of banned and challenged comics.
Their list includes two Neil Gaiman titles, Sandman and The Graveyard Book , as well two popular Batman titles -- Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Alan Moore's The Killing Joke -- plus Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, Maus by Art Spiegelman, and even Amazing Spider-Man: Revelations by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita, Jr.
"This Banned Books Week, we're asking people of all political persuasions to come together and celebrate Our Right to Read," says a coalition supporting the event. The ALA reports that half of the most frequently challenged books were in fact actually banned last year, according to the library group's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which calculates there were 17% more attempts to censor books in America in 2016. The five most-challenged books all contained LGBT characters, and the most common phrase used to complain about books is "sexually explicit," the OIF told Publisher's Weekly -- perhaps reflecting a change in targets. He believes one reason is that most challenges now are reported not for books in the library but against books in the advanced English curricula of some schools. This change also represents a shift upward in the age of the readers of the most challenged books. "We've moved from helicopter parenting, where people were hovering over their kids, to Velcro parenting," LaRue says. "There's no space at all between the hand of the parent and the head of the child. These are kids who are 16, 17; in one year they're going to be old enough to sign up for the military, get married, or vote, and their parents are still trying to protect them from content that is sexually explicit. I think that's a shift from overprotectiveness to almost suffocating."
Three of the 10 most-challenged books were graphic novels, so the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is sharing their own list of banned and challenged comics.
Their list includes two Neil Gaiman titles, Sandman and The Graveyard Book , as well two popular Batman titles -- Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Alan Moore's The Killing Joke -- plus Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, Maus by Art Spiegelman, and even Amazing Spider-Man: Revelations by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita, Jr.
Why is it not a rule that you have to actually read the book before you ban it? Or did the censor completely miss the message of the book?
This one is from a public library so I have no idea what the problem with the age group is. It also shows another complete lack of understanding of the material.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm willing to bet all those books are being banned by conservatives, you know, the same conservatives that elected a president that called for peacefully protesting football players to be fired.
Again these scum show their hypocracy. Freedom of speech applies only to them. Not to liberals who call them for what they are: primitive slavers, racists, sexists, misogynists pigs.
Go ahead, scumbags, mod me down to hell. But it won't change what you see in the mirror, it won't change what you'll see in your children's and grandchildren's eyes when they look down on you with disgust, thinking of the world you left them.
Unfortunately, no one has yet seen fit to add Trump: The Art of The Deal, nor any of Mr Orange's other fine examples of American literature, to their banned books lists. I guess he never even considered using the slogan, Make American Books Great Again, since he obviously had nothing to lend to that fight.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
The summary says most of the challenges are NOT about public libraries, but about school curriculum. One example being ELEMENTARY school having kids read about a transgender child.
So yes, "appropriate for age group" is a very valid concern - there are certainly books that are available to adults, but we shouldn't force all third and fourth graders to read them.
Multiple books on the list were about transgender children, presenting that as normal. It could well be argued that parents shouldn't be putting their children through multiple surgeries and heavy doses of unnatural hormones to turn a boy into a girl or vice versa, in the vast majority of cases. That's the kind of thing a person ought to decide for themselves, making an informed decision when they are an adult, some would say.
One might reasonably think that having surgeries done on your little boy to turn him into a little girl may, in many cases, be child abuse, so forcing elementary school kids to read that is normal may not be appropriate.
I don't care to argue for or against on any of these issues, but they are certainly issues on which reasonable people may disagree. On such issues, perhaps the government schools shouldn't be forcing this stuff on grade-school kids. If you want to teach your kids that it's normal to chop off a little boys penis, you can do that, but I don't see that you have a need or a right to force that on every other family.