Next week is Banned Books Week in the U.S. (Canada has a Freedom to Read Week in February.) The event was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. During the last week of September every year, hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events.
Check out some of the books that have been banned in recent years here then go to your library and check them out for real.
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This is a monument in the Bebelplatz, Berlin, the site of a Nazi bookburning ceremony in May 1933.
More than 20,000 books were burned.
That is a very cool monument.
It is wonderfully imposing, isn’t it? As if to say, “Go ahead and try to destroy me.”
That is a great monument. I never knew Doris Lessing had a banned book. I am a big fan of her books and I am always looking for one of hers when I am in the secondhand book shops. Will have to find out which one it was. Do you know? My Wednesday post is normally about the book I am reading so I hope you don’t mind if I add a link to this one. Many thanks Charmaine
Hi, Charmaine. Please feel free to link. I think the Lessing in this pile is the German Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an Enlightenment writer and dramatist. I know his name for _Laocoon_, an essay on painting and poetry, but I did have to Google it to remind myself! Doris Lessing’s books may well have been banned in North America, God knows the entire enterprise is so ridiculous I can no longer be surprised by what gets banned, but she herself was banned from returning to her home in Rhodesia because of her communist sympathies.
Thank you for the update. I knew you would know the answer. Cheers Charmaine
Some go so far as to ban the dictionary: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/01/27/california-school-district-bans-dictionary-oral-sex-definition/
Next: banning the alphabet, ’cause you never know what dirty words those evil kids will spell next!
There is a very sweet novel to that effect: Ella Minnow Pea (L, M, N, O, P). Letters of the alphabet are systematically outlawed and the island’s inhabitants have to learn to communicate with an ever-dwindling supply of letters. Great fun to read.