It’s Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s yearly event to spotlight attempts at censorship. If you have a censorship story to tell, we want to hear it. I come from a bookish people. My parents didn’t restrict my reading in any way and until I hit my tweens, I had never come across the concept of a book being “inappropriate.” At 12, I read well above my age group, within my age group, and was also a big fan of Clifford the Big Red […]
“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
There is something particularly powerful about reading someone’s accounting of their dogged pursual of truth, of what is right, of what matters and we are treated to just that in Catch and Kill. In his second book Ronan Farrow reckons with the institutional powers and societal inequities that create the sort of stories he’s worked on reporting for the past few years at The New Yorker. Part memoir, part investigative report, Catch and Kill is an imminently fast read, jumping from one unbelievable if it […]
Bingo #3 With a Banned Short Story
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
In a bit of bingo logistics, I decided a couple short stories might be in order to fill in as many remaining squares as I could. With that in mind I went down the list of things I’ve been meaning to read anyway and came across “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson which has quite the history of making people question its place in front of readers at all. What I didn’t know was just how short it really is – its only 3,773 words long! […]
First Love and Losing Faith
Blankets by Craig Thompson
CBR11 Bingo Square: Banned Books I remember reading Blankets a number of years ago, and if I recall correctly, I liked certain aspects but didn’t love it. But having a copy on my shelves, I decided to re-visit it for my Banned Books square, after learning that both this novel and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home were challenged and subsequently removed from the public library in Marshall, Missouri, after complaints that the novels were “pornographic” and might be read by children. This began a series of […]
Why was this so popular? I don’t get it.
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
This seems to be a book that everyone in a certain age bracket has read. A lot of people have read it, don’t get me wrong, but it seems that every woman over 50 I’ve talked to remembers reading it close to when it came out. It was a big deal. It has multiple movie adaptations. And I can’t really see why. Maybe it’s for the nostalgia. While shelved in the adult section now, it was kind of a YA hit when it came out, […]