We need to get a book exchange going here on FA to swap out books to help encourage reading. What do you think?

That's a really cool idea!

When I first thought of banned books, all I could think of was The Anarchist Cookbook. Now I'm looking into this stuff, turns out it's not as deep and conspiracy-like as I expected. A lot the ones from the last decade scream "think of the children" as their reason for being there.

It's not! Books are almost always banned for completely ridiculous, inconsequential reasons.

That site is really insightful. Turns out my first impression was true: the largest group responsible for book banning is parents. Ridiculous. God forbid your child is exposed to new ideas and makes up their own opinions and perspective on the work.

Lucky for me, my parents didn't seem to give a rat's patoot what I read, and my dad had one of those "100 classic works of literature" libraries (not to mention my grandmother's vast collection of books and my aunt who gave me stuff way above my reading level at the time, like Clan of the Cave Bear - Neanderthal sex!!!). I can't imagine restricting a kid the way these people want to do. Protecting your child is one thing, sheltering them is something entirely different . . . and god forbid you just sit your kid down before or after reading something challenging and DISCUSSING it with them!

Wow. It blows my mind that something like Brave New World was challenged for supposedly being too sexually-explicit... There are NO sex-scenes in the book! Not one! It's mentioned a few times in the context of it being a healthy activity for the proper polite Malthusian Girl or as the employment of the main character's stranded mother (she was a whore) who did it to survive her misery. Silly people are silly.

At least, Meyer's travesty is on the list (Twilight), though it should be just for it's horrible role-model for females in the form of Bella and for simply being terribly written! LOL

So many books "challenged", so many for the stupidest of reasons! Heh, I've even read several of them. "The Colour Purple" was a disturbing read for me, mostly because of how it echoed my own childhood, but it shouldn't be banned- it's as accurate a reflection of the garbage us people of colour have had to put up with from the so-called "superior" European-based, white society as any I've so far read... (I'm Native American, though I do have have a lot of Caucasian ancestry so I end up being a rather nice olive tone. LOL)

Yeah, the Color Purple was incredibly disturbing - I read it when I was in my late teens. Disturbing, but I think people SHOULD be disturbed to learn about that.

Honestly, padding ourselves from the evils of the world only makes us forget they even exist and should be fought against, assuming we've ever gotten a chance to learn about them in the first place, which banning books like "The Colour Purple" will prevent us from doing. Whoever it was that said "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" (or something similar to that) was very astute in that observation. Banning books prevents us from "learning from history" and in my mind, is tantamount to a social crime against humanity.