Banned Books - Tumblr Posts
thinking about these pins (+ 1 sticker) from pride 💜 I love them sooo much :D
This is facts
The Handmaid's Tale isn't really my cup of tea. Beloved was great but also not really my thing. But neither of these books should be banned for whatever arbitrary reasons people have come up with
"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.
"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.
"Read Banned Books" a new full page cartoon essay published in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section today.
Preliminary data for 2024 (from the same page):
Banned Books Statistics - Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2024)
Graphics from https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data
Banned Books Week 2024
Banned Books Week starts today, September 22nd, and runs through September 28th. With the current political climate in the US and beyond, it's a sad truth that the books most often challenged and banned in the US are queer stories, and so we wanted to take this week to shout out these books. Seven of the ten have been challenged because of LGBTQIA+ content.
The ten most challenged books of 2023 are:
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson
This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Flamer by Mike Curato
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
Let's Talk About It by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan
Sold by Patricia McCormick
I've personally only read 2 - Gender Queer and Flamer - and both were excellent. I definitely need to get on reading more though.
Some months ago I bought the most banned book in the USA 2022 as a protest and it was ONE OF THE BEST DESICION OF MY LIFE! I found myself in this book in so many ways that it helped me understand myself better. At the same time I found enough differences to my own experiences that I started to draw and write something like a personal response (one that I will never publish but that I hold dear to my heart). There were pages in this book that made me want to gift it to anyone who didn't understand my gender or sexuality.
Book banning does nothing but harm. It keeps people from understanding themselves, or history, or others... And it is not lost to anyone, that this is a war on queer people and people of colour specifically.
The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.
Heh
I truly hate the word “unalive.” There are so many other euphemisms that fictional Italian mobsters worked so hard to provide you with and you just ignore them.
God bless you! Free the books!
The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.
This is just such a sad and terrible thing to be happening.
I remember reading Maus one semester in my senior years at high school for English. I never actually managed to finish the book, but I do remember that what I did read was absolutely beautifully written and told such an important story.
To think that it has now been added to a list of banned books when we live in a time when we need to learn as much from the mistakes of the past as possible is horrifying.
Tonight I gave Art Spiegelman the National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. And we're both being banned. Some of you may think this is a good thing because you don't like my books or you don't care for Maus. But I guarantee that there are books you love on the banned lists too. That's why libraries and librarians fight for their rights to have all the books on the shelves and for your rights to read them. And it's why I support them.
read the full article here
help fight book censorship
public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):
brooklyn (13-21yo us residents)
seattle (13-26yo us residents)
boston (13-26yo us residents)
los angeles (13-18yo california residents)
san diego (12-26yo us residents, not the whole collection just commonly banned books)
these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.
ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!
i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!
i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.
spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.
I can't say fuck but I can get fucked, right? Isn't that the big joke? It can happen but I can't talk about it. I can get scammed out of knowledge, cheated out of my history, blinded by lies, and I can have my questions shoved back down my throat. Silenced. Erased. Oppressed. Because if we talk about it people remember and god forbid humanity is portrayed as anything less than perfect. God forbid there was war and genocide and racism and hate and blood in the streets. God forbid we talk about it. Learn about it. As if it wasn't some dirty little secret to hide away and hope disappears. Language is butchered in schools. Literature is too. It is emaciated. Sucked dry of all its substance and sustenance because the things that we stand to gain from it are "uncomfortable" and "obscene". My education should not be based of your comfort. I'm sorry that reality doesn't fit with in the paradigm of your fantasized utopia built on a card house. I'm sorry that the truth falls on the wayside of your razor thin line of comfort and conformity. I'm sorry that you are uncomfortable acknowledging the mistakes of yourself, of your people, of history, of humanity. Your cowardice stifles my generation because you would rather live in a world built by pretty lies. And that I cannot stand for. Give me books that break my heart. I want to scream, I want to sob, I want to feel something get ripped out of my chest, and I want to remember. Emotions tell us we are alive and pain tells us that we have lived and grown and endured. Literature and the art of words is absolutely destroyed by standard education. It becomes standardized and full of rules and bullshit because if they made it easy to understand we would all be smarter for it. And a smart people is a people hard to control. When you ban books you restrict the human condition, you suffocate art, and you attempt to purge the growth of humanity. We grow through language, we grow through expression, and we grow by having our hearts ripped out. We grow through pain and we grow through remembering and learning to be better. Please. Let us bleed. We will be stronger for it.
Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don't have yet to add to our purchase list.
We’re celebrating Banned Books Week with this awesome display of dangerous books. Don’t get too close, it might give you ideas.
