“1 archaic : curse
2: to prohibit especially by legal means <ban discrimination>; also : to prohibit the use, performance, or distribution of <ban a book> <ban a pesticide>
3: bar 3c <banned from the U.N.>
Example of Ban:
The school banned that book for many years.”
Yay! It’s banned and challenged books week! A time to celebrate freedom of thought by reminding everyone to read freely!
The UConn co-op will be participating in the Banned Books Week Virtual Read Out (http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/virtualreadout). Feel free to come in and read from your favorite banned and/or challenged book!
At the last banned book event that I went to, a year or so ago, called “Free thinkers read freely”, I discovered that “Games and the Giant Peach” had been banned from certain schools because the wicked ants are squashed by a peach and Miss Spider licks her lips. Many books that I enjoyed or even books that I didn’t especially enjoy but that caused me to think (thus I consider them particularly valuable) have been banned or challenged. The list of children’s literature that is banned and/or challenged is comprised of practically any book that I read, liked, and was influenced by growing up (Alice in Wonderland, Are you there God? It’s me Margaret, The Lorax, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, etc.).
Denying access to literature is denying access to thought, varying perspectives, understanding, and critical thinking. Sometime the censorship isn’t a blatant ban. Books come out abridged or with a few words changed. For instance, Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: is on our banned and challenged display for its use of the “N” word and its portrayal of slavery and racism. If the words are changed then how do readers understand what Twain saw and was trying to change in his time? Ditto for if the book is banned? It denies readers a chance to understand and think critically about a hot topic in American history. “Just as some people would like it,” George Orwell might say. How creepy is it to think you might be in a George Orwell novel? (Yes, he’s definitely on the banned and challenged list.) The only up side to banned literature is that it gets people to read and “exorcise their first amendment right to read a banned book” (1). A classic may be “something that everyone talks about but no one ever reads” as Mark Twain said but a banned book is always a best seller, as one student found when she started a banned library out of her locker when her school imposed a banned reading list, http://www.care2.com/causes/student-runs-secret-banned-books-library-from-locker.html.