Skip to main content

Flagging Enthusiasm For Banned Books Week

How could I almost forget to blog about Banned Books Week? After National Library Week, it's probably the biggest holiday in Libraryland. I love Banned Books Week because it gives me a chance to talk about books I love because, let's face  it, some of the best books are the ones that cause controversy. As I used to do on my old book blog, here are the top 10 most challenged books from the last year according to the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom and the two I've actually gotten around to reading are in bold:

  1. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
    Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
  2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
    Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
  3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit
  4. Crank by Ellen Hopkins
    Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit
  5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
    Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
  6. Lush by Natasha Friend
    Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
  7. What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
    Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
  8. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
    Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint
  9. Revolutionary Voices edited by Amy Sonnie
    Reasons:  homosexuality and sexually explicit
  10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
    Reasons: religious viewpoint and violence

Since I started blogging about BBW when I was a starry-eyed library school student I've had to deal with an actual book challenge. The story is fairly mundane.

At my last library a lady had complained about the explicit nature of a book in my section.The title and picture on the cover left no hints to the racy nature of the book, so when an 80-year-old Sidney Sheldon reader picked it up, she was understandably upset. I had chosen the book because it received rave reviews in several publications. After a long talk with her about how everyone's reading habits are different and how important it is to read the blurb on the back cover we ended our conversation as friends.

However, I also learned an important lesson as a selector. Looking at how often the book had circulated, I realized that just because something gets enthusiastic reviews in all the major trade publications doesn't mean that it's going to be a high interest item in my library. After talking to one of my colleagues who'd bought for my section in the past, she explained that generally books like that one (translations) didn't circulate well, even if Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly got excited about them.

So if I chose to buy fewer books in translation after this encounter would that have been censorship? If I decided not to buy books in translation because they might be too scandalous and invite challenge, then you could certainly make that argument. But in this case I chose not to buy certain books because past evidence showed me that my patrons had little interest in checking them out, and at that library we really didn't have shelf space for books that didn't check out fairly frequently.

Normally, I spend my BBW post talking about the horrors of censorship and proudly waving the banner of intellectual freedom. I'm not trying to shy away from those topics this year, it's just that the last few years of working in the real world have tempered my idealism a little. Absolutely we should try to carry the books our patrons are interested in. But intellectual freedom doesn't mean that we go out of our way to buy every potentially offensive book we can find.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PLA - Day 1

Today was my first day at the Public Library Association conference, and I'm not sure how I'm going to do 2.5 more days and keep my head from exploding. There's just so much that's so relevant to my job, I can find something interesting everywhere I look. This morning I went to the Get Your Game On: Gaming in Libraries Preconference, and it was wonderful. I realized that I need to stop playing the role of wife of a gamer and own that I know a thing or two about video games, too, and what I don't know I can learn. Eli and Aaron spent the first half of the program talking about the benefits of gaming and why libraries should be doing gaming, which is something I'd always bought, but never been very good at articulating. Essentially it boils down to all the different types of literacies learned through video games and what are libraries for if not promoting literacy. It was also interesting they argued that the way libraries get the most value out of gaming is by...
Post a Comment
Read more

2016 Reading Resolutions

As has become the norm in recent years, I'm going to try to read 100 books total, but I'm not going to get picky about counting them, so how ever many books Goodreads said I read this year is my total. Progress: 100 of 100 I really hated reading from a specific list of titles last year, so this year I'm going to go back to an Alphabet Soup Challenge. This year, I'll try to read a book written by an author whose last name starts with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Progress: 23 of 26 A: Alire, Benjamin Saenz - Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe B: Bradley, Anna - A Wicked Way to Win an Earl C: Cline, Ernest - Ready Player One D: Dickens, Charles - Oliver Twist E: Ellison, Ralph -   Invisible Man F: Faulkner, William - Absalom, Absalom! G: Garcia, Kami and Margaret Stohl - Beautiful Darkness H: Holm, Jennifer L. - The Fourteenth Goldfish I: Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day J: Johnston, Aaron and Orson Scott Card - Ea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflections of a New Community College Librarian

After months of searching I finally found found a job and I have to say that I'm really surprised with both where I landed and how much I'm loving it. After focusing primarily on the public library reference jobs that were similar to my most recent position, I stumbled onto a couple openings at nearby community colleges. When I'd first graduated from library school I heard somewhere that people who worked in community college libraries claimed they were this magical land where public meets academic, where you don't have to deal with spoiled rich kids and people are looking for things more stimulating than the latest James Patterson novel. But I went to library school so I could become a public librarian and I loved the public library job I eventually got, so I never really thought about that statement. While I loved my public library job, one of things I discovered I loved most about it was teaching public computer classes. Eventually it clicked with me that academi...
Post a Comment
Read more