Celebrate Banned Books Week!
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
“Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.” Salman Rushdie
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” Oscar Wilde
This week is Banned Books Week in the US and I wanted to link to a great blog post written by a good friend of ours Doris, here. Doris has collected a variety of blogs and vlogs from many of our wonderful friends, including Sue, Nick and James, which discuss banned books and our right to read them. Check them out!
Banning books is something I don’t really understand. Sure if you don’t like a book, don’t read it, don’t let your children read it, but what makes you think you can make that decision for other people, for other families? The very idea is too close to Nazi book burnings in my opinion, and yet I found out the other day that it is illegal in Germany to publish new editions of Mein Kampf. It’s not banned, but you can’t print it; there are copies in libraries (sometimes under lock and key) and private homes, but you won’t find it in a bookshop. Is that hypocritical? I’m not sure, but by all accounts it’s really terribly written and its only value is historical, not literary. In contrast there are some truly amazing and wonderfully-written books on the Banned Books list; some of my favourite are Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and of course, the one at the top.
The Harry Potter series is currently number 1 on the list of Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books so far this century. Seeing as these are the books that brought us together, they are obviously very important to us, and the idea of someone trying to take away other people’s right to read them is adominable. So please exercise your freedom to choose and read a banned book this week.