LITERATURE: Banned Book Week

Thanks to Sycamore Review for reminding us of the American Library Association’s celebration of Banned Books Week, September 23rd through the 30th.

Proud to see that I’ve read quite a number of them, the latest being Nabokov’s Lolita, and that I have a good dozen or more of them on the hearth in the reading pile.

Another link is Google’s listing.

This brought to mind my mother’s questioning of my senior high school English teacher’s selection of Catcher in the Rye.  Guess thumbing through a few pages and seeing the language was enough to make her nervous, but my mother was all for arts and literature–though she’d only finished two years of high school herself.  She accepted and understood my argument that taking text out of context of the whole did not represent the value of the book.

Visit the sites–you’ll be surprised to find that so many are still being challenged and banned from school systems even now. Tell others about this, one of our most basic human rights.

And, read some of these classics.