It's Banned Books Week

Sept 26 - Oct 3 is Banned Books Week.  (Also here)  Now, I'm against banning books.  But, if you look at the details, the good news is that books aren't getting banned.

The ALA provides details.

A "challenge" is an attempt by somebody to get a book removed, usually from a school class or library.  Since 1995, there has been a slow decline in the number of challenges.  The primary reason for challenges are concerns about Sex and Language, shown below.

The targets of the complaints are, overwhelmingly, schools and public libraries - see below:

And the actual complainant is, overwhelmingly, a parent.  Organized pressure groups, government, and religions groups are a very small fraction of the complainants.

So, parents are complaining about books in schools - or, in a positive light, taking an interest in their children's education.  Is there a problem?  Here is a PDF report of challenges in 2007-2008.  Thanks to the miracle of computers, you can search on terms like "banned".

One book was "banned", Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy.

One book was "restricted", Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice on Her Way.

I counted about a dozen actual book removals.  This doesn't count a Catholic school removing the Harry Potter books because of their themes of witchcraft.  While I think this was a silly decision on their part, it's a private, religious school and its their right to remove books they feel inappropriate to their religion.

Notably, other than one outright theft from a public library, all the bannings, restrictions, and removals were from schools, not from public libraries.

Here is a list of the ten most challenged books.  I looked into details of two, chosen vaguely at random.

Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar, deals with "the lives and romances amongst the privileged teenagers" and is now a CW TV series.  Here's selected lines from the wikipedia synopsis of the first book.

"Teenager Blair Waldorf sneaks away from a party at a friend's house to have sex with her boyfriend Nate Archibald ...  She is also unhappy to learn that Nate and Serena had sex the summer before Serena left"

Naomi Wolf, hardly a conservative religious fanatic, writes that "sex saturates the Gossip Girl books".  And shouldn't we be trying to have kids read literature?  In my high school, not only did we walk through snow uphill both ways, but we read books like Grapes of Wrath, while my teacher pontificated on the genius of Thomas Hardy.  Today kids read trashy CW sitcoms?


The TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R series, by Lauren Myracle.  ttyl "gained attention for being the first-ever novel written entirely in the style of instant messaging conversation."  It has "frank and mature content".  Now, I'm not sure about the content, but should we be teaching students to read English, or IM?


In conclusion, the anti-book-banning people have done a great job.  (The WSJ comes up with somewhat different statistics than I did, but the same conclusion)   Books are not getting banned, and even the ALA admits it: "most of the books featured during [Banned Books Week] were not banned."  Frankly, the books drawing criticism from parents concerned about their children's education seem to deserve it.