Banned Book Week

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

 Ray Bradbury

I've been learning a lot about banned books this week, and found a number of reasons why books are banned. In my opinion, the reason why most books banned is because of vulgar language. It doesn't matter if the books are really amazing that it deserves the highest medal award. If there are a ton of swear words than certain people freak out and demand it to be banned. Another reason, I found why books are banned is because of the topic it talks about, such as homosexuality, magic, racism, kids killing kids, teen pregnancy, kids trying to learn how to be accepted but doesn't attend school that much, etc. 

And it makes me angry that all of these books are banned. No, homosexuality isn't a disease and people won't become gay if they read Heather Has Two Mommies or any other book that talk about homosexuality. Kids won't have low morals if they read The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or anything else. And no kids won't become violent if they read The Hunger Games trilogy.

It also makes me angry when some people ban books even though they haven’t read it at all. What’s the point of banning something if you don’t even know what the book is really about? Have they even tried to find what the theme (moral lesson) of the book really is? Have they thought really hard what it meant to other people or did they just ask themselves, this sucks because it has                      etc, let’ s not read it anymore and let’s have other people not read it or else they’re not a good person or whatever.

That is by law, a violation of free speech. If something is banned at the library, than that’s taking one less idea that is replaced by yay we banned this book now let’s burn them or something like that. That’s one less story for a person to get into, to escape his/her own life at the moment. It’s one less dream, one more sadness for the author, but it’s a lot more anger for the people who enjoyed that story.

We have the right to read whatever we want, and it’s our choice to endure the consequences that come out of it. If someone doesn’t like it than that’s fine, but it’s stupid of him/her to take that book away from a reader that enjoyed that book, or a reader that wants to read that book.

It’s like a person who hates the stars and tells the other people to not go to the stars, if that makes sense.

So I dare you this week and any other week to read a banned book. Whether it’s a book that has been banned from this year or any other year, read it. And if you don’t like it then that is fine, but don’t let it get taken away from the library because that is one less great literature out of the world. A work of literature that can possibly help us in the future if things go wrong. Literature that can make people small with one small character, a funny sentence/paragraph, or something else. Literature that can inspire.

Lists:

2011/2012 list of Banned Books

Banned classics

Books that were banned in 2005

Books banned by government (includes governments outside of the United States)

A very large amount of Banned Books on Goodreads

And more if you google: banned books list, or something of that sort. 

Now a video from authors who stand for free speech.