What's different about book challenges now from the old days--when you had to get a copy of the ALA's Banned Books Guide, published every three years by Robert C. Doyle, in order to find out the reason for repeated challenges to certain books--is immediacy. When a couple of challenges were recently lodged in our own state of Missouri, the YA reading community exploded with activity.
Laurie Halse Anderson posted about the Missouri challenge to Speak on her blog. Indiana teacher Paul Hankins started a Twitter feed called #speakloudly. Teri Lesesne, also known as Professor Nana, launched a series of posts on her blog about Banned Books Week, but also resolved to buy multiple copies of Speak and other books challenged in Missouri (including Sarah Ockler's Twenty Boy Summer and Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) and send them out to teachers across the country.
Now professor and YA author David Gill has started a website where teachers, librarians, bloggers, and authors can come together to speak out against the censorship of media materials for teens. Here you can find archives of #speakloudly Twitter posts as well as posts by bloggers who have joined in on the conversation in the past week. There's a Facebook group for Banned Books Week, too.
All this activity around book challenges can leave your head spinning. But what better way to remind us of the importance of Banned Books Week--and the importance of an informed, invested reading public.
Jennifer Buehler
I think book bans are very interesting because of the reasoning behind them. Why are people so scared of a book? Books can have a lot of power, however, people continue to make the biggest mistake, if you don't want someone to do something, ignore it. If people continue to give these banned books more attention then they are only going to get read and discussed. Now don't get me wrong, I support the freedom to read books. I just find it very interesting that people draw so much attention to things they do not want people to see or know about.
ReplyDeleteOn the side of the school, I could understand not promoting a book in the classroom or including it in the curriculum. However, the outright banning of the book seems unnecessary. Students are more likely to do what they are told not to do. If there are some issues in a book that the school or parents think is not appropriate for the students then there should be some kind of intervention for those students who have read the book.
We talked in class about the importance of discussing young adult literature, all literature in fact. So the more people discuss the books the more understanding we can gleam from them. One strategy may be to use the author as a tool within a discussion. Some questions for them could be, why did you tell the story this way or why did you include controversial topics in your novel. These types of questions can help student, parents, teachers, and administration understand the value of these books. A good example of an author who would be open to defending and explaining the choice in her novel would be Laurie Halse Anderson. After reading several defense of Speak, it seems that other authors may follow in step as well.
Wow, I said yesterday that the online YA community has exploded with activity in response to the Missouri editorial denigrating Speak and Twenty Boy Summer. Now the New York Times has picked up the story:
ReplyDeletehttp://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/twitter-banned-books-new-best-friend/?pagemode=print
How did I found out? I visited David Gill's Speak Loudly website this morning and saw a Twitter post by Paul Hankins announcing the NYT's coverage.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/28/in-tradition-of-twain-authors-lash-out-at-censors-this-week/?hpt=C2
ReplyDeleteMark Twain is oft-credited with saying, "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." German poet Heinrich Heine more seriously addressed the matter in an 1821 play, warning, "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people."
The prediction came 112 years before Nazis burned thousands of books in a public square. The quote from Heine, whose books were among those burned in 1933, is engraved in the ground at the Bebelplatz to remind people of the tragic day
Above is a section of an article about banned books week I read from CNN's home page. I thought this was really interesting especially Heinrich Heine's prediction.
Wow again. Linked from Paul Hankins (this time sharing on Facebook!), another article about the #speakloudly campaign. This one provides a compelling narrative overview of what happened when the online YA community sprang into action last Sunday, September 19th, around the attacks on SPEAK, TWENTY BOY SUMMER, and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-web-speaks-loudly-against-book-bans/19647941
The author of this article, Catherine Hyde Ryan, is also the author of the book PAY IT FORWARD.