It's Banned Books Week.

Today is the first day of this year's Banned Books Week. The event is sponsored by a coalition of groups, including the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Association, the Association of University Presses, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, PEN America, and the People for the American Way Foundation.

This year's slogan is: "Books Unite Us -- Censorship Divides Us." The organizers are sponsoring a whole bunch of events this week, many of them virtual; if you're not Zoomed out yet, you can check out the list here.

So which books are we talking about? The ALA put out a list earlier this year of the top 10 most-often-challenged books of 2020. Here they are, with title, author(s), and a short description of the reason why people didn't want them in their library.

1. George by Alex Gino. LGBTQIA+ content and conflicting with a religious viewpoint.
2. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds. "Selective storytelling incidents" and "does not encompass racism among all people." Also folks didn't like Kendi's public comments.
3. All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Profanity, drug use, alcoholism, and containing anti-police views and "divisive topics".
4. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. Rape, profanity, contained a political viewpoint, and was biased against male students.
5. The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Profanity and sexual references.
6. Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story About Racial Injustice by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin. "Divisive language" and was thought to promote anti-police views.
7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Racial slurs and its perception of the Black experience.
8. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Racial slurs and racial stereotypes.
9. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Sexually explicit and contains child sexual abuse.
10. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Profanity and was thought to promote an anti-police message.

You might have noted a theme here: Seven of the ten books are about race or an "anti-police message" -- which is to say the challenges might be the result of the Black Lives Matter protests last year, although To Kill a Mockingbird and The Bluest Eye are perennials on the list. 

And these are just the top 10. In all, more than 270 books were challenged last year, and while there was an increase in requests to ban books about minority issues, the biggest reason people wanted certain books gone was LGBTQIA+ content.

Every year I say I'm going to read more banned books, and every year I realize I've only read a couple of the books on the list. For example, I've yet to pick up Sherman Alexie's book, even though it has been on the list more than once over the past several years, and I'm kicking myself because he is hilarious. So on the Kindle it goes -- along with George, which I just found out is about a girl who was born a boy. Hoo boy, no wonder the prudes want it banned. Looking forward to reading that one!

Happy reading!

***

These moments of subversive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Post mortem: Banned Books Week 2013.

From the organizers, as tweaked by Kriss Morton.

Yesterday was the final day of this year's Banned Books Week. In my usual timely manner, I'm late to the party. My justification for talking about it now is that, like most observances of this sort, we should be vigilant about the suppression of books, and the ideas in them, all year long.

And not only because I fully expect the Pipe Woman Chronicles will make the list one of these days, if I ever get famous enough.

Look at any list of banned books, in any given year, and you'll find entries from the sublime to the ridiculous.Take the 2012 list. I mean, okay, Fifty Shades of S&M makes sense. Right? But Toni Morrison's Beloved won a Pulitzer, for gods' sake, and Morrison herself won the Nobel for literature in 1992. And what's the deal with Captain Underpants, anyway? [A pause while I go googling...] Hmm, okay, I get it now. It's subversive -- the kids disobey authority. Never mind that our nation was founded by a bunch of guys who disobeyed authority.

But I digress.

Tor.com ran a series of blog posts about banned books this week, and one of them talked about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Like many sci-fi and fantasy novels that tackle religion, Pullman sets his series in what amounts to an alternate universe. The "evil overlords" are represented by Mrs. Coulter, but it's clear that what Pullman is really jabbing at is organized religion -- a point that was not lost on the Catholic League when "The Golden Compass," the movie version of the first book, was released in 2007. The group mounted a protest against the books, saying they were "written to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism."

Pullman more or less copped to the charge in an interview with the Guardian after he won a major British literary prize, the Whitbread, in 2002. In it, he said:

The original impulses of the great religious geniuses -- with whom I include Jesus -- were, as often as not, something that all of us would benefit from studying and living by. The churches and priesthoods would benefit more than most, but they dare not.... [I]n my view, belief in God seems to be a very good excuse, on the part of those who claim to believe, for doing many wicked things that they wouldn't feel justified in doing without such a belief.

(That's not far too afield from where the Pipe Woman Chronicles end up. Alas, my series lacks Pullman's subtlety. But I digress again.)

The fight against book banning, and in favor of free speech, has been going on pretty much forever, and no one expects it to end any time soon. Whenever an author -- whether it be Dav Pilkey (who wrote the Captain Underpants books) or Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) or Philip Pullman or Toni Morrison -- tweaks the nose of someone in authority, authority is going to try to silence that author. That's why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the first amendment: to protect those who dare to speak truth to power.

***
Thanks to those of you who took advantage of the free days this week and downloaded the first two Land, Sea, Sky stories. Please stick around -- there's more to come. The third story, "Prophecy," will go live next month, and the first draft of Crosswind is officially in the can.  I've got a Pinterest board set up already, too, for the gods and goddesses in the new series. Why, yes, September has been a busy month...

***
These moments of unbanned blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.