My favourite banned books

I know this because my birthday fell on a very special day that featured a supermoon and the start of Banned Book Week.

Every year I celebrate the American Library Association’s (ALA) Banned Book Week.

This is a week dedicated to promoting great works of literature that have been challenged or banned in one place or another. Banned Book Week celebrates our right to read good literature.

Here are some of my favourite banned books.

1. Hop on Pop by Dr Seuss – Believe it or not, The Toronto Public Library had to defend Hop on Pop in 2014 when patrons filed a complaint and a request to have this book banned because they believed Dr Seuss’s book promotes violence against fathers.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel faced challenges in Hanover, Virginia, in 1966 when parents argued to ban the book because the plot contained reference to a rape. In 1977, it was banned in Eden Valley, Minnesota, for the words “damn” and “whore lady”. A school in New York banned Harper Lee’s famous novel about prejudice in the deep South in 1980 because it was a “filthy, trashy novel.” Many schools in the US still ban the novel.

3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – You might expect this book about two boys growing up in Afghanistan to be banned in that country, but schools in the states of Idaho and North Carolina in the US called for this book to be banned from schools because of violence. These schools also condemned Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck because of language and general content that they considered to be an affront to religious parents who are trying to raise their children in a respectable manner.

4. The Humming- Bird Tree by Ian McDonald – Here, in Trinidad and Tobago, we have had our share of ignorance when it comes to banning books as well. The Humming-Bird Tree, a beautiful story at about the friendship of an English boy and two Trinidadian children of East Indian descent was taken off the CXC exam when misguided, misinformed— and might I add narrow-minded— people took one innocent scene with children bathing naked in a river, blew it out of proportion and caused mass panic that prevented some schools from using the book.

Here, in T&T, ignorant radio deejays jumped on the bandwagon of those uninformed people who complained.

Radio announcers read a passage from The Humming-Bird Tree out of context and then inflamed a bad situation with their ignorant comments.

You can find more information about The American Library Association’s Banned Book Week on a website entitled Defend the Freedom to Read: It’s Everybody’s Job at http://www.ala.org/ bbooks/.

Read a Banned Book and support the right to read. Celebrate the freedom to read.