Banned Books Week

This is Banned Books Week! Celebrating our freedom to read what we damn well please! (And by association - to write it too).

The website has a list of the top ten challenged books for each of the last ten years. It's interesting - the number of challenges seems to stay pretty consistently between 400 and 500. And it's surprising to me that as recently as 2009, JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird were in the TOP TEN challenged (a specific attempt to remove them from libraries or curriculae). Other classics that remain popular targets are Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

What struck me during my perusal of this list were the ones that were being challenged based on "homosexuality."  The reason code didn't indicate any distinction between homosexual themes, explicitly stated acts or just overall friendliness to the topic, so a couple of these left me wondering.  

Year of Challenge	Place	Title	Author
2009	2	And Tango Makes Three	Justin Richardson Peter Parnell
	3	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
	7	My Sister's Keeper	Jodi Picoult
2008	1	And Tango Makes Three	Justin Richardson Peter Parnell
	6	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
	8	Uncle Bobby's Wedding	Sarah S Brannen
2007	1	And Tango Makes Three	Justin Richardson Peter Parnell
	6	The Color Purple	Alice Walker
	10	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
2006	1	And Tango Makes Three	Justin Richardson Peter Parnell
	2	Gossip Girls	Cecily Von Ziegesar
	7	Athletic Shorts	Chris Crutcher
	8	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
2005	1	It's Perfectly Normal:  Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health	Robie H Harris
2004	5	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	Stephen Chbosky
	8	King & King	Linda deHaan
	9	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Maya Angelou
2003	7	It's Perfectly Normal:  Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health	Robie H Harris
	9	King & King	Linda deHaan
2002	2	Alice	Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
2001		none with the homosexual challenge

I've read My Sister's Keeper, and I was surprised to see this one objected to under the homosexual tag.  Many of these get objected to frequently, but not always with this particular tag (such as Gossip Girls and The Color Purple).  I think it's interesting to note that 2001 and 2002 had the least number of top ten books with a homosexual complaint.  Sign of the times? Or sign of the "genre" expanding? I'm sure my bookselling friends will enlighten me.  Another oddity to me was the Twilight series had a main objection of "religion."  The first couple of books don't directly deal with religion at all, but anyone who's paying attention will note that the author is a Mormon, and her ideas around relationships are fairly obviously informed by her background.  I can't speak to the rest because I refused to read further than #2.

Anyway - I totally know what's next on my reading list - Richardson and Parnell must be doing something fantastic in And Tango Makes Three to keep scoring so many objections.  I feel the need to catch up.