Thursday, September 25, 2014

More great stuff for banned books week

I have been scouring the web all this week for good blurbs about BBW and I have found a few good ones that I will proceed to share. If you were a banned book, which one would you be? Hm, take this quiz and find out. (I got Slaughterhouse Five by the way). This post from Book Riot is a talk back that uses quotes from the book themselves to deliver some rebuttals against those who would seek to censor them.

The always funny buzzfeed has this collection of books with a slider that allows you to make them "normal". Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for example could be known as Harry Potter and the Completely Normal Childhood That Was in no Way Magical. Hilarious!

Graphic novels are often among the list of challenged and banned books and NPR explores this topic further.
Dav Pilkey eloquently explains how you can express your concern about a book or graphic novel without undermining the freedom to read of your fellow citizens.

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Some banned books have had a profound and lasting effect on generations of American youth and are staples of summer reading lists. (In my library for example we can never have too many copies of A Catcher in the Rye). Even though I moved to the US at age twenty reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a a profound experience for me because I could feel his frustration. Even though I did not agree with his way of acting towards the world I could understand why and many others like him felt the way they did. This list contains those books that have helped shape the America we know.

Finally I came across a fascinating collection of beautiful quotes from the Huffington Post that almost made me tear up (I stopped reading them before I did). This one from Sherman Alexie's wonderful The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is my personal fave. "The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know"   Wow.

If you'd like to find out more about BBW events, check here.

Follow them on Twitter @BannedBooksWeek and on Facebook.

Tape yourself during the Virtual Read Out




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