courtesy American Library Association
It seems fitting that Moms LA called attention to the Glendale Unified School District’s efforts to keep Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood out of an AP English classroom at the beginning of 2011 Banned Books Week (Sept. 24 – Oct. 1).
The American Library Association (ALA) and its partners have been calling attention to the issue of censorship and celebrating the freedom to read during the last week of September every year since 1982. “Freedom to read” also includes the freedom not to read books that we might find objectionable, of course…but in a free society, the individual should be the one who exercises those freedoms and makes those choices, not some self-appointed educational or morality police.
It’s entirely reasonable for parents to be the ones to exercise those rights on behalf of their own young children regarding what they read in their own homes, of course. But as children get older, the parents’ role – as well as the schools’ – should shift toward giving kids the tools to discern what’s worth reading for themselves. It’s harder to develop that discernment when options are limited and critical thinking is discouraged; sometimes what’s worth reading just might “convey shocking, controversial or unpopular ideas.”
Banned Books Week calls attention to the fact that the freedom to read gets challenged every day of the year by factions who try to impose their views on schools, libraries, and communities, calling for certain books to be removed. According to the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, the 10 most-frequently challenged books in 2010 were:
- And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
- Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
- The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
- Lush, by Natasha Friend
- What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
- Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
- Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about two male penguins who hatch an egg and raise the baby bird together, has ranked high on the list every year since 2006. Books like Brave New World and Nickel and Dimed are unlikely to be used in curriculum outside of advanced high-school classes, like Holly Ciotti’s in Glendale. While some of the objections raised to The Hunger Games and Twilight – violence, sexual content, inappropriate relationships - may be understandable if you’ve read them, the challenges don’t seem to be hurting their popularity. On the other hand, a few of these titles might not attract much notice at all if they weren’t on the list, frankly.
J.K. Rowling’s books were the most-challenged of the past decade, but the Harry Potter series seems to have done quite well despite that. Young-adult classics like Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (originally published in 1974) and Forever... by Judy Blume (1975) are well into their third decade of regular appearances on the banned-books list. Grade-school kids are still amused by Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series, which ranked in the top 15 most-challenged books of 2000-2009.
As for In Cold Blood, a modern classic of narrative nonfiction as well as a landmark in the true-crime genre: yes, it’s been banned – most recently, from a high-school AP English curriculum in Georgia. It was later reinstated. Glendale Unified might learn something from that.
Florinda Pendley Vasquez blogs primarily but not exclusively about books (including banned ones, sometimes) at The 3 R’s Blog: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness
