Banned Books Week begins Saturday and runs through October 6th. That's plenty of time to frazzle the powers that be by reading something deemed "inappropriate."
What was the most banned book of 2006? Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell's And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins parenting an egg from a mixed-sex penguin couple. Due to issues of homosexuality, it's been challenged this last year, a lot.
And, let's throw some Toni Morrison in there as well. One of the best writers of her generation, both The Bluest Eye and Beloved were banned due to its sexual content and offensive language.
Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories was banned because of its occult/Satanism. What's scary is that it's been challenged.
You want a kid to read? Ban a book and they'll get their hands on it. I remember in middle school digging into Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, and other authors of banned books simply because I knew they must hold something amazing within their pages, something the adults knew that I didn't at the time, something about, well, the truth, the truth of our world, our times, our people. Why they don't want kids to learn of these truths is beyond me.
For a list of the 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990 to 2000 look here. So, this week my friend read Maya Angelou or J.K. Rowling, Alice Walker or Judy Blume, Roald Dahl or Stephen King, Isabel Allende or Kurt Vonnegut. Let people know that we have the freedom to express our opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and, further, we're allowed to learn of these different viewpoints and make our own decisions.
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