Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, said, "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." That is the essence of Banned Books Week. Until we value the worth of what we read and the freedom we have to engage with that material, how can we fall passionately in love with reading and ideas?Many of the books that are challenged each year (meaning that someone has attempted to restrict access to that material) are teen books. And it isn't just about Harry Potter or The Golden Compass either: it includes classics (To Kill a Mockingbird), award winners (The Giver), realistic fiction (Fat Kid Rules the World), and more.
Your students are reading many of these books every year. Ask them to guess how many of their favorite books are books that have been challenged or banned. Discuss how censorship and freedom of expression play into our daily lives. It is only when we realize that these supposedly "abstract" ideas affect us personally that we come wrestle with the scandalous, fascinating, thought-provoking, life-changing thing that reading is.
More resources:
- Most Frequently Challenged Books and Authors of 2007
- Top 100 Challenged Books of 2000-2007
- Banned or Challenged Books from Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the Century
- How to Support Banned Books Week
