Thinking Parents know how enthusiastically we celebrate Banned Books Week here at Snook, every September. Last year’s theme was “Ideas Are Incombustible” and imo still fits the social inferno some folks are stoking with spittle-soaked frenzy.
This year’s official theme features a robot unplugging his head from the Borg download, happily reading a real book instead. (No technology required, not even a Kindle.)
You can tell the robot is happy from its glowing eyes and smile of satisfaction. If you follow the sequence of robot art through the whole list of books known to have been challenged during the past year, you can see the free-to-read robot’s power of story play out — thinking for yourself and letting others do the same turns into real liberty (and eyes aglow from books) for all.
Who could be against that? Well, this parent for one:
Lee, Harper
To Kill a MockingbirdRemoved from the St. Edmund Campion Secondary
School classrooms in Brampton, Ontario, Canada
(2009) because a parent objected to language used
in the novel, including the word “nigger.”
Source: Nov2009, pp. 203–4.
And this guy — who sounds like he should cut way back on the caffeine and might keep deadly firearms at home but perversely fixates on the threat of library books in his child’s backpack instead. We loved this book when FavD was a kid, read it aloud together and then went on to read several more ZKS)
Snyder, Zilpha Keatley
The Egypt Game
Dell; Macmillan
Challenged as part of a reading list in a fourth-grade
class at Southern Hills Elementary School in Wichita
Falls, Tex. (2009) because the book includes scenes
depicting Egyptian worship rituals. The Newberry
Award-winning book has been an optional part of the
school district’s curriculum for years.“I’m not going to stop until it’s banned from the school district. I will not quiet down. I will not back down. I don’t believe any student should be subjected to anything that has to do with evil gods or black magic,” said the student’s father.
Source: Jan2010, p. 17.
Trying to ban To Kill a Mockingbird is itself OBSCENE, of course, and also politically incorrect, far more so than the way the author uses language as power of story, including the n-word.
Trying to restrict or ban or purge “anything that has to do with evil gods” would empty most libraries of both fiction and nonfiction, including Christian books from bibles to the Left Behind series, all sorts of poetry, polemics and sermon collections. Music and film collections wouldn’t take up much space there anymore, either. 
(And don’t even get me started on Sarah Palin and her witch-hunting pentecostal preacher laying hands on her to invoke some evil god’s power to make HER president! There go all the newspapers too.)
But the one on the new list that really annoyed me was this parent’s rah-rah-America rationale for anti-American book banning: TeaParty economics.
Talk about evil gods . . .
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
Challenged at the Easton, Penn. School District
(2010), but retained despite a parent’s claim the
book promotes “economic fallacies” and socialist
ideas, as well as advocating the use of illegal drugs
and belittling Christians.
Source: May 2010, p. 107.
“Bad news, religious people”.
Taking bets now, as to whether this book will be next:
Speaking of religious people, it’s not just book-banning in the news but book-BURNING, resurrecting Savonarola’s historic bonfires. Pyres of piety.
(I read about Savonarola in a children’s book some today would ban or burn, by an award-winning author who lives in our book-burning state:
“In Konigsburg’s novel T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit, Chloe spends the summer in Florida with her stepfather’s sister, who runs a meals-on-wheels van and becomes involved in a controversy over T-back swimming suits.” )
Savonarola and Jones have a lot in common. Maybe Jones will end up as Savonarola did, burning in his own hellfire.
Good advice for book banners and burners everywhere: read the supposedly damned thing first!
[...] first book I loved enough to make me hate those who would burn it or ban it, was a bible as worth living by and dying for as any other, by god, the SOUTHERN bible — Gone [...]
The next Zilpha Keatley Synder book we read after “The Egypt Game” was “The Gypsy Game.” I wonder if it will be censored now too, because ethnocentric prejudice against gypsies or Roma (immigrants from Roma-nia) never ended in at least one western democracy (besides our own Hispanic and Arab anti-immigrant backlashing, I mean.)
In August, the French government began publicizing the destruction of illegal Roma camps and the ensuing deportations.
(If your kids are too young for Victor Hugo’s actual books and plays which were censored for politics too, think Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame movie, remember how the gypsies were hounded and hunted, their homes and families raided? God help the outcasts — and immigrants.)
Goodreads dot com group discussing banned and challenged books here, currently reading
(Cock of the snook to Valerie.)
What are books good for? by William Germano
Stephen Colbert just now:
“It’s Banned Books Week. Why not sit down and redact a story with your child?”
BBC Magazine quoting Cheryl Marcum in Stockton MO, who lost a censorship battle defending a book that upset many parents, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:
[...] time for the 2006 celebration, which was the silver anniversary. Last year’s posts are here: Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same and If I Had a Robot, Would I Hammer in the [...]
How are we supposed to discuss prejudice and discrimination, if we do not keep these memories, and thoughts and imaginings in their original form.
Ugly can be an art form too. It can become scale models of dystopias no one wants to live in.
Nickel and Dimed was challenged?
Wow that does beat all!
I have that book. I met her at a lecture. It’s a great book that examines how this consumer culture dehumanizes minimum wage-slaves, while always seeking lower and lower prices for more more more.
Perfect — that can be your banned book to thumb through this week!
It does seem sort of apropos during this time of Religio-Political targeting of the working poor and middle class.