The Most Challenged Books of 2011

[proud2BlibKansan]

The American Library Association released their annual list of “most challenged” books this week. According to their report, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received 326 reports* of attempts to pull or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves across the country.

Here’s a list of the top 10 books.

A display of challenged or banned books in the Youth Services department at the Lansing Public Library in Lansing, Ill.

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r(series), by Lauren Myracle

2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4. My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

http://billmoyers.com/2012/04/12/the-most-challenged-books-of-2011/

[Th1onein]

1. They banned "To Kill a Mockingbird"? You gotta be kidding me!

What kind of idiot would ban that book? Geez.

[pokerfan]

4. Mockingbird is one of the most banned books

People have asked for the book to be removed because it’s allegedly full of “racism and offensive language,” the Flashlight Worthy Books website says. (Similar reasons have been given to ban Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well as some of author William Faulkner’s novels.)

The website then makes this point: “If we ban To Kill a Mockingbird for racism, I suppose we should ban the Civil War classic The Red Badge of Courage for violence.”

http://blogs.clarionledger.com/jmitchell/2010/10/01/to-kill-a-mockingbird-among-most-banned-books/

(Harry Potter book burning in New Mexico)

[Th1onein]

6. These people really are some sick puppies nt

[Odin2005]

2. The religious loonies need to get a life.

[Journeyman]

3. My reply to those who seek to challenge books read by schoolchildren. . .

is to point out that every day, day after day, over 9,500 children die because of lack of water or, more frequently, from drinking diseased water.* That's over 27 jumbo jets filled with children crashing with no survivors every day. Better than one an hour. That's enough to fill a football stadium every Saturday, empty it out by carting away the dead, then fill it again in time for the next week's game.

And the numbers of dead grow every year, because populations continue to grow each year and very little is done annually to rectify the increasing problems with our water worldwide.

In light of this, being concerned about the reading habits of well-fed high school students who have ready access to potable water seems the very definition of criminal behavior. When so much could be done so easily with just the desire to help, when the world could be made infinitely better if people just turned their interests to the things that matter, consuming precious hours and effort in the fruitless pursuit of denying others knowledge does seem beyond pointless. It is criminal.


*Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It, by Paul Simon (1998)

[lunasun]

5. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

yea that had GOT to go right???
dont want to know about castes, Epsilons or mass consumer throw away world woes

best to turn on the TV and live it without reference