Banned Book Week: Celebrate the Freedom to Read

Each year during the last week of September, libraries and bookstores cobble together a Banned Books Week display. You know the ones: they made your Mom worry with fright when she found you reading them alone in your bedroom; your Sunday school teacher called you a ‘problem child’ when she found the book in your desk. It was the book that brought you and your friends together in the schoolyard to discuss what happened in the next chapter, and whether or not the heroin would fall victim in the story. The Banned Books include classics like, The Catcher in the Rye, almost every Judy Blume book, Harry Potter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twilight, and the list goes on and on.

In addition to all the books people have banished, Banned Book Week is a week to celebrate freedom of speech and spread awareness of censorship. With that being said, we have compiled a list of some books that you might be surprised to see on the “banned book” list over the past 50 years, and the even more surprising reasons people wanted them banned. What do you think?

1. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein. Apparently this book “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”
2. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?”
3. Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank. “It is a real ‘downer.” (Seriously…it’s a book about the Holocaust. Of course it’s a downer.)
4. The American Heritage Dictionary “There were 39 words people didn’t like, most of them words one learns during a health class in middle school”
5. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. “The people in the region did not like how their area and the workers’ situation was portrayed in the novel.”
6. The Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey. It is said that this book contains offensive language, to be sexually explicit and to be “anti-family.”
7. Grimm’s Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm. In 1989, a few school districts in California found a new reason to ban this book: misuse of alcohol. Little Red Riding Hood’s basket for her grandmother contains wine. Maybe it didn’t pair well with the rest of the basket.
8. Many Waters by Madeleine C. L’Engle. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.”
9. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. “It’s a story about homosexual penguins.”
10. The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. “It depicts good witches, and good witches are “theologically impossible.”