Banned Books Week is the national book community’s annual celebration of the freedom to read and is sponsored by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
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Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. But things haven’t always been so uncontroversial.
For this year’s celebration of challenged or banned young adult books, the American Library Association put together a list of the 10 most-challenged YA titles in 2014 as well.
This year’s Banned Books Week theme is young adult fiction, which includes popular titles such as the “Harry Potter” series, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower“, “The Giver”, and “Go Ask Alice”.
Books that have been banned in the past sit on shelves beside a chair near the entrance to the Mesa County Public Library’s central branch at Fifth Street and Grand Avenue.
Books are most often challenged by parents rather than organizations, teachers or religious groups.
It’s these books that are featured at Maria’s Bookshop, as well as White Rabbit Books & Curiosities, until October 3 in honor of the weeklong event. (Sims has said she’ll keep appealing.) So in one corner were the media, the masses, the author, and the school board.
Reasons: anti-family, cultural insensitivity, drugs/alcohol/smoking, gambling, offensive language, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group, violence. “These are the books that speak most immediately to young people, dealing with numerous hard issues that arise in their own lives, or in the lives of their friends”.
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Another book with a controversial history in the Grand Valley is seeing increased interest, according to library spokesman Bob Kretschman. Pekoll notes that challenges have decreased since the 1990s, which may be in part due to the internet. Many people believe that censorship doesn’t happen anymore. The ALA maintains an interactive project, “Mapping Censorship,” that displays cases of book bans and challenges across the United States (and a few stray cases overseas) between 2007 and 2012. “When someone tells us ‘you can’t read that, ‘ we naturally pick it up and read it”. Additional reasons: “politically, racially, and socially offensive”, “graphic depictions”. Additional reasons: “date rape and masturbation”.
