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Health & Fitness

Hey It's Banned Books Week!

Why do we ban books in an open society where freedom of speech is protected? And why should we celebrate banned books anyway?

My older brother introduced me to the first banned book I ever read.  I was between the seventh and eighth grades and he bought The Catcher In The Rye for me to read on the plane from New York to Minneapolis. I've been reading banned books ever since.  My book shelves are populated here and there with books that have been banned at one time or another like Franny and Zooey, As I Lay Dying, A Farewell To Arms, and The Great Gatsby. One of my favorite banned books has two parts; the first part is full of sex, incest, and violence, and the second part is about a socialist who walks around talking about feeding the poor.  At least that's the way I'd summarize this well-known, but little-read book.  

This week all across the country, libraries are celebrating Banned Books Week.  If you stop into your local library you'll, no doubt, see a display of some of the more common banned books.  If you're curious you can search Google for "books currently banned in the United States," or "the ALA list of banned books."  The latter is the American Library Association's list of the most commonly banned books in this country.  There are about 100 books on the list.

So why are books banned?  You can search Google for that too.  You'll find lots of reasons: sexually explicit material, offensive language, material not suited to age group, homosexuality, anti-family, violence, occult themes, and so on.  Think The Scarlet Letter.  But we can find all of that and more on prime-time sitcoms.  By the way, these days we're supposed to refer to "challenged books" and not "banned books" or "censorship," but that's a whole lot like saying "I interrupted my pregnancy." What we're actually doing to the books is banning them or trying to anyway.  It's censorship and never forget that. 

So if the reasons to ban a book can be found at 8:30 in the evening during a sitcom about a family, then why do people really censor works of literature and other books like Where's Waldo? As I said above, I've read a lot of banned books over the years and it seems to me they all share one thing in common: they all get to a truth about what it means to be human.  Take The Catcher In The Rye for example.  Here's a story of a young boy of 16 who smokes, drinks, swears, and wants to have sex.  He is disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the adult world and the lying that accompanies it.   Sounds a whole lot like me at 16 and every 16 year-old I've known since then.  But I'm pretty sure you'd rather pretend your 16 year old isn't smoking, drinking, and having sex.  Wouldn't you?  And you'd certainly wouldn't want him or her to read a book about a 16 year old doing that stuff...

Let's take a look at Where's Waldo?.  This won't be as scary for you parents.  Where's Waldo?, for those of you who live in a cave, is a puzzle book.  Waldo is an odd looking boy who wears James Joyce glasses, a red and white stripped shirt, blue pants, and a red and white stripped stocking cap.  He's a very distinctive individual who should stand out in a crowd.  The puzzle is, of course, to find Waldo in a crowd.  Seriously harder than one would think, this finding Waldo business.  It would seem that no matter how distinctive we are, there are others just as distinctive and it's actually rather hard in life to really stand out.  Unless, of course, you take an automatic weapon and gun down people at a school or at a United States Naval Base.  

If you ask me there is no higher honor for an author than to have her book banned by someone here in the United States.  It means she said something extremely important. Back when the Soviet Union existed, they sent their poets to prison  because they understood how dangerous a poet actually is to a society.

So let's celebrate!  Run out and buy a banned book or two and read it this week.  It'll do you good.  Word. 

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