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Do you read banned books?

Banned Books Week will begin Sunday
Banned Books Week will begin Sunday.

According to the American Library Association, more than 11,300 books have been banned in the United States since 1982.

Banning books feels impossible in America, with the First Amendment protecting freedom of the press, and our right to read what we want, when. In Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, book censorship hid many atrocities from the general public and criminalized important critiques of society. In America, we don’t feel like we live in a society that struggles with intellectual censorship. On a national level, banning books is illegal, and freedom of speech is held in high regard. Yet an average of 330 books are challenged or banned in individual schools and local libraries every year. The ALA estimates that only a quarter of challenges are reported, making it clear that freedom of information is not always encouraged.

From Sunday (Sept. 25) to Oct. 1, Banned Books Week will be held in bookstores and libraries across the nation. Molly Huff, bookseller at Maria’s Bookshop, says it is “a week when we take the time to celebrate critical thinking, a week to reflect on books that have been challenged in the past and why, a week to focus on authors who can’t get their work out there due to censorship.” Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 by the ALA, in response to an increase in reports of book censorship.

Each year, Banned Books Week is given a theme highlighting common reasons that books are banned. Last year’s theme focused on examining LGBT and gender issues. “It is important to keep that momentum going,” Huff says.

This years theme is diversity. “The idea of diversity is always at play in banned books,” Huff says. In the top 10 banned books of this year, four fall under the LGBT category; three deal with religion, Islam and Christianity; one deals with disability; and another examines teen depression and suicide. These books often examine and discuss viewpoints not often accepted mainstream society. Analyzing CCBC statistics from 1994-2012, publisher Lee & Low found that even though people of color made up 37 percent of U.S. population, only 10 percent of books published in those years contain multicultural content.

Maria’s bookseller Kevin Johnson says, “Supporting the right to speak and read diversely is to bring all voices to the forefront of discussion.”

Books are banned or challenged for a variety of reasons, such as sex, in Fifty Shades of Grey; or promoting violence and encouraging disobedience in children, in A Light in the Attic. The top five reasons books are pulled from library and school shelves are sex, profanity, drugs, violence and paradigm questioning (when the book contains subject matter that could lead to the questioning of core beliefs in a community). Parents are often the challenging party, though administrators are also instigators.

Over the course of Banned Books Week, Maria’s Bookshop will be labeling all of the books in the store that have been banned with when and where they were banned and for what reasons.

“We’re hoping to get a reaction from people,” Huff says. “We want to push the envelope of what people think of as a bannable book.”

On Sunday, Durango High School students will be meeting at Maria’s Bookshop to discuss the banning of books and the issue of censorship. Bryan Bagdol’s class will be reading banned books in front of the store beginning at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 30.

For more information about Banned Books Week, go to www.bannedbooksweek.com or www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek, and inquire in the Durango Public Library or your favorite local bookstore. The librarians and booksellers are all very passionate about the subject of book censorship, and it’s always interesting to see if a favorite book has been banned, and for what reasons.

Huff’s favorite banned book is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, challenged in 2007 by the Catholic League for promotion of atheism and its critical views on Catholicism.

Johnson’s favorite banned book is a book about banning books: Fahrenheit 451, which has been banned on several occasions for profanity. What’s your favorite?

2015 banned, challenged books

These were the top 10 banned and challenged books of last year. The list was put out by the American Library Association.)

1. Looking for Alaska, by John Green

2. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James

3. I Am Jazz, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings

4. Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, by Susan Kuklin

5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

6. The Holy Bible

7. Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

8. Habibi, by Craig Thompson

9. Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan, by Jeanette Winter

10. Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan

Sep 27, 2016
Durango High School students debate banning of books


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