…book week starts this Saturday the 25th and lasts till October 2.
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm
If anything, whatcha gonna read? ^^
I really can’t help but wonder how some of these books got on the list.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings probably because of rape (I think I recall rape in that book), but that’s a little much for number three (although I do hate that book).
Bless Me, Ultima… I GUESS because it makes some comparisons between Roman Catholicism and paganism.
The Bluest Eye probably because of incest rape (what’s with black female authors writing about girls being raped by fathers or stepfathers?).
Flower for Algernon I assume due to its portrayal of the mentally handicapped…
But Where’s Waldo? Where’s FUCKING Waldo? Come on…
As for which book I’d read, probably the Anarchist’s Cookbook. In fact, a tongue in cheek political test I once took suggested that as reading.
Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter? (doubletake)
Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and To Kill a Mockingbird aren’t surprising at all. While they are good books (I’m assumin Tom is, never read it), their use of racial slurs as common terms (which they were for the settings of the books) generally lands them on banned book lists.
As for Harry Potter, remember the hullabaloo about promoting witchcraft and whatnot.
Ahh, banded book week, where we thank God we can read a Irvine Welsh book were a drunk soccer fan punches the teeth out of a man’s mouth and makes him give him head in the back of a taxi cab.
The Giver? Why is that on this list? I don’t remember anything wrong with it. James and the Giant Peach? A Wrinkle in Time? I think people are digging a little too deep when trying to find reasons to ban a book.
I’d love to know exactly WHO originally thought that Amerrican Psycho should be banned. >_>
I believe the banned James and the Giant Peach, since the giant peach killed his wicket aunts (by rolling over them)
Wrinkle in Time could be called “Witchcraft” I guess.
Same thing with the The Giver since he had the power to see and give others the visions of the past.
Of course the people who try to ban books are the same people who think children will kill each other and have sex with monkeys if they hear the word “evolution”.
Eh, not always. Maybe the witchcraft ones, yes, but books like Huckleberry Finn are banned, I believe, more by people who feel that racial slurs, even when used in literature set in a timeframe when such language was acceptable, have no place in our society at all.
Yeah. Like how they wanted to ban the word “niggardly”. Stupid US government. I think they got away with it as well…
Only case of niggardly I know of was when an aide to the DC mayor used it several years ago. He had to resign, but was later rehired when the public realized the mistake was on their end as he used no racial slur. A similar event may have happened with NFL commentators; I don’t quite remember. Hardly the US government getting away with banning the word, Pie.
Maybe I’m thinking of something else though. I DO remember it being put on the actual news that the word was ‘not to be said in public conversations’. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a victim of normal PC-ness.
I remember something about The Giver that people might be offended by. It was when The Giver watched his daughter suicide herself through lethal injection.
How in God’s green earth can Where’s Waldo be challenged and not something like Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The latter would make any adult freak if their kid was reading that…unless they were Neo-Nazis.
I did To Kill A Mockingbird for my Junior Cert last year…
Ugh, I thought it was going to be a thread about marching band. ;_; Which I am in a predicament with right now. : \ And why are they “banning” books? O_o Isn’t that like… against the law, or something. o.o;
Edit: Fuckin’ A, Robert Cormier is on the list, I read a few of that guys books a while ago and I remember loving them.
984, go ahead and read the anarchist’s cookbook, but be warned, it’s the biggest load of bullshit ever written.
I’d choose to read curses, hexes and spells out of all them, going just by title mind you.
He is right you know. I read that, mostly for myself and to see what my enemies in the future would use, and half of it is garbage. The effects some of those “concoctions” produce are weak.
Ohhh duh, i forgot about that part, yeah that would probly be a better reason
Ah right, that. I remember being vaguely disturbed by that book, yeah. And I was forced to make a fricking poster on the damn thing, which didn’t help.