Banned Books Week

So even though it's the end of Banned Books Week, I still decided to blog about it because I think it's an important topic. Every year, readers get to celebrate their freedom to read freely. We are all extremely lucky to live in a country with free speech, free press, and everything mentioned in the First Amendment. This includes the right to read whatever we want. So it drives me crazy when people try to ban books in public schools and libraries. Sure, there's explicit things that maybe young students shouldn't be reading. But if you look at the Banned Books List, you can see that almost every book is harmless. It drives me crazy when people think they can tell people what they are allowed to read or not. I think these people have a superiority complex or something, because I would would never tell someone else what can and cannot read. And I wouldn't want someone telling my kids what they can and cannot read.

For example, a few months ago, a school in New York wanted the junior class to read Looking For Alaska by John Green. As we all know, there is some inappropiate content so the school sent out a letter asking the parents if it was okay if their child read the book. But another parent, one that had a freshmen student and had no association with the junior class, read the book and decided that no one should be able to read it. I mean, how crazy is that? I can't believe that some people feel threatened by the written word and that they would ban books and burn them in rallies. Okay, so I'm not sure if people actually do that but it sounded good.

Anyway, all I'm trying to say is: don't take any crap from those crazy book banners who think they know anything about books. Because obviously, they don't.

For more information on Banned Books Week, visit www.ala.org/bbooks/.