Banned Book Week

It’s the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book Week, which draws attention to books that have been challenged in libraries or classrooms over the last year.

I’ve long had somewhat ambiguous feelings about Banned Book Week.  On the one hand, I hate seeing a small group of people trying to limit what everyone else can read or assign to read.  On the other hand, efforts to suppress books in the United States tend to be spectacularly unsuccessful.  At worst a book gets taken off a classroom reading list or out of a school/community library.  But the attention that that the challenging of the book brings may well bring more readers to the book than would have been there in the first place.

At any rate, librarian Jessamyn West, the “rarin’ librarian,” has a great Banned Books Week post with all the links you could possibly want with a nuanced look at what level of banning actually happens in the US.  (Ms. West has some interesting links about one of the few books that has actually been suppressed in the United States, a sort-of sequel to J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye by Fredrik Colting.  The book was kept from being published or sold in the US on copyright grounds.)

For 2012, the most frequently challenged books included:

1. Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey.
   Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.
   Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group
3. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher.
   Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group
4. Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, by E. L. James.
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit
5. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
   Reasons: Homosexuality, unsuited for age group
6. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
   Reasons: Homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit
7. Looking for Alaska, by John Green.
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group
8. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
   Reasons: Unsuited for age group, violence
9. The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit
10. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
    Reasons: Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence