Target of the Well-read Man

In commemoration of Banned Book Week, the website of the Office For Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, published a list of the top 100 banned or challenged books from the turn of the new millennium to 2009.

I have to admit that I am unfamiliar with most of the books on the list, although now I'm thinking of reading several of them. I did notice some titles that perennially appear on such lists, but also some I was quite surprised to find here. Just a few from the list are:

The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
Captain Underpants, by Dav Pilkey
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney
Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Joy of Gay Sex, by Dr. Charles Silverstein
Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissenger
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle
The Goosebumps series, by R.L. Stine

These books represent new and established classics and some of the most critically acclaimed and seminal works in American letters.

Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types –- in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.

As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty: "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it."

Free Access to Libraries for Minors, an interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (ALA's basic policy concerning access to information) states that, “Librarians and governing bodies should maintain that parents—and only parents—have the right and the responsibility to restrict the access of their children—and only their children—to library resources.”

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas remarked: "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Phil Kerby, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times observed, “Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.”

To see the entire list, go to: www.ala.org/bbooks/top-100-bannedchallenged-books-2000-2009

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451