Starting tomorrow, we once again celebrate Banned Books Week. I don’t generally attend any events, but it’s a good reminder that there are those people out there who want to choose what you or your child may and may not read. The official site has some great activity ideas and a fascinating map of where books have been recently banned. Its a lot more geographically spread out than I’d expected.

When we were reading Beloved by Toni Morrison in high school, one of the other area schools banned it over a single paragraph (if you’ve read it, you know which one), to which we all rolled our eyes. I didn’t particularly enjoy reading Beloved and I would have loved to have not been assigned it, but I didn’t see any purpose for the ban. If you can’t handle adult literature by the time you’re 16, you probably shouldn’t be taking a literature course so advanced that you’re assigned books on the level of Beloved.

My personal experience with banned books is fairly limited. I mean, I’ve read plenty of them, but I usually didn’t know they were challenged beforehand.  I’ve only read two of the books on the top ten most frequently challenged list. (Side note: it amuses me how almost all of them claim to be “unsuited” for the age group, because evidently children cannot think for themselves until they start college.) Come to think of it, I don’t even have any banned books on my TBR pile. Huh.

To celebrate, I’ll probably release some banned books into the wild. Let people make up their own minds about whether or not to read them.

P.S. – Oh hey, that top ten list was from 2008. I’ve read six of the entries from 2009. How about you?
P.P.S. – How cute are these bracelets!