Banned Books Week in 2021 runs from September 18 through September 24. The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association has made this statement: "In basic terms, intellectual freedom means the right of any person to believe whatever they want on any subject and to express their beliefs or ideas in whatever way they think appropriate . . . . The definition of intellectual freedom has a second, integral part: namely the right of unrestricted access to all information and ideas regardless of the medium of communication used."
You can search online for lists of banned books, and you may be surprised by what pops up - classics, award-winning books, even some books that were assigned reading when I was in school. There have always been groups of people who have tried to restrict what others can read, but now the risks to teachers, librarians, and book-sellers are rising. Many states now have new book ban laws that limit what one can do or say to provide or promote books. An alarming number of directives are coming from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools. PEN America (an organization of more than 7,500 writers whose mission is to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible) says that "book banning, as a form of censorship, implicates First Amendment prohibitions on the ability of government entities to ban or punish expression, making these documented efforts by lawmakers all the more concerning".
A gentleman named Lester Asheim wrote: "In the past librarians saw selection of materials as one of their most important professional responsibilities. . . . .Provision of materials on all sides of an issue was seen as an essential of the library's role in the society. Librarians might exercise judgment about the quality of a book, but not about the ideas in it". That is intellectual freedom: providing free access to intellectual thought. That's what I have tried to do at Plymouth Library.
The Top 10 Challenged Books of 2021 are:
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and profanity and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for depictions of abuse and because it was considered to be sexually explicit
*The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity and violence and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references, and use of a derogatory term
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and degrading to women
*The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it depicts child sexual abuse and was considered sexually explicit
This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
Reasons: Banned, challenged, relocated, and restricted for providing sex education and LGBTQIA+ content
Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit.
*in Plymouth Library's collection
"Fahrenheit 451 - the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns."
"The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers." Montag was a fireman, but in his world of the future , firemen didn't put out fires; they burned books; they incinerated ideas. I knew this. I had seen the movie with Oskar Werner and Julie Christie. But in the movie, the firemen were doing the bidding of some totalitarian government , a 1984 Big Brother.
I assumed the people, with those few oddball exceptions, had had their intellectual curiosity stifled in infancy ; that they were victims whose brains had been sucked dry by the governmental monster. Whether or not that was what the movie attempted to portray, it certainly was not the picture described in the book. In Bradbury 's world , it was the people who turned their backs on books. How did it happen? The Fire Captain, Faber, explains: "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped. English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work.. . .Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less." Is this Bradbury's future world, or is it today?
"Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder the books stopped selling....But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive . . . . It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum. no declaration, no censorship, to start with."
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury