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Happy Banned Book Week Everybody!

  • Thread starter swords
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Sept 27th - Oct 4th is Banned Book Week. Since I'm all for the reading of such subversive literature as Naked Lunch, The Bible and To Kill A Mockingbird among all the others, why not take a spin by the Forbidden book library of banned books and locate all your favorites and see why they were banned and what happened to some of the authors....

http://title.forbiddenlibrary.com/

In celebration I found a recently published book about some books that the author feels SHOULD be banned because he personally doesn't like them.
10 Books That Screwed Up the World
http://www.amazon.com/10-Books-That-Screwed-World/dp/1596980559/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222931237&sr=8-1
 
Yay! Banned books! I didn't know it there was such thing as Banned Book Week. Coincidentally, I began reading the Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark series by the great Alvin Schwartz to my younger brother yesterday as one of my October activities. These books were challenged and banned in some elementary schools during the 90's:

http://ala8.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm


http://www.txla.org/pubs/tlj-3q97/article6.html



“It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” — Judy Blume
 
Its funny that I find several of my favorite books on that list. What does that say about me?
 
Yeah, I knew there were banned books but didn't know they had set up a week about it til I was in the bookshop yesterday and they had a big display with yellow police crime scene tape and warning stickers on of many of these "evil" works. There are many more banned books than just on that site there - such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Wilhelm Reich (who's writings were burned by the US government), etc.... This one was just the first site I found that had books and why they were banned.
 
Oddly enough, on Monday my advanced English II class started reading To Kill A Mockingbird. Go figure!
 
Its funny that I find several of my favorite books on that list. What does that say about me?

It says you're a normal person, and that's because only good books are banned. Anything thats not controversial enough to enter schools is more fun to read. Why else do you think the poor kids are stuck reading such things as Shakespeare? Because every book I ever read in school was total rubbish, thats for sure. And in today's world where everything is PC.......
 
A Light in the Attic is on there..... wow.
 
I'm the kind of person who reads almost any book and likes it. I have on my shelves: The Harry Potter series, Book of Cats, Lad: A Dog, among others. I admit I favor fantasy, Stephen King, and anything about animals, though.
 
Come now, don't be too hard on old Bill (Shakespeare), the establishment was plenty against his works too. Actually it can be difficult to find anything of his that hasn't been "doctored" to make it more acceptable for academia.

I've been reading the available works of Marquis De Sade lately. 3/4 of his stuff was burned and we'll never get to see it. But what survives is simply amazing. Yeah, it's old timey and also "naughty" (perhaps the first times the "F" word appeared in print, repeatedly) but if you can get past the "naughty" scenes, his libertine/libertarian/anarchist politics is what actually got him locked up. He knew the value of sex as in "sex sells" to get the interest of the public but it was the other ideas in his work that set the aristocracy on it's ear. And being imprisoned as a "subversive" may have been what saved his neck during the French revolution.
 
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