Banned Books Week

Saturday marked the beginning of Banned Books Week. It's amazing to me that books are still being banned. This is nuts. Doesn't any society know that once you say that something exists, but YOU CAN'T HAVE IT, becuase it's SO SCANDELOUS and CRAZY, it just QUADRUPLES the demand? Any DIETER knows this! The best thing is to let it exist and LIE LOW about it. But alas, such threatening works as Captain Underpants are among the most highly contested.

One of my favorite books of all time, a book which began the journey of WANTING TO WRITE for more people than I can count, Cathcer in the Rye, is STILL thought of as TOO dangerous to let certain people read. I guess they don't like people to read catchy prose that infects one with ideas of their own, so that they want to maybe write a book or think of their lives or maybe wonder where the ducks go when the pond freezes over. Same with such SEXY books as Tom Sawyer. I can remember all the evil just pouring through me when I was in the seventh grade and gripped with the drama of Tom and Becky Thatcher trapped in the cave. I mean, would they kiss or wouldn't they? It was a romance, right?

As a creative, who was fortunate to be born into a country, which was founded on freedom of speech (that country being California), I've lived the luxury of reading what I wanted to read and had my life changed forever. I can't imagine where I would be if I hadn't read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee--two books that profoundly shaped my world and what I thought possible, and are listed as two of the most contested books of from 1990-2000. Actually, I probably owe a lot of my sanity throughout early adolescence to S.E. Hinton.

The American Library Association has a site dedictaed to Banned Books Week with lots of great info, including what one can do to fight censorship and keep books available in local libraries. As my friend Kathryn, who sent me the link says: "These are not your grandmother’s librarians. They are tough and they are serious about intellectual freedoms." Amen to that! Thank goodness for tough librarians!