Tomorrow marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, September 20â27 each year. Observed in America since 1982, the annual event reminds us not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.
Find out more here.
As a book lover and an opponent of censorship, I feel that Banned Book Week is a good time for awareness and celebration of our freedoms.
6 comments on “Banned Books Week”
Funny how they observe that in America, as the US govnt and their patriot act or whatever it’s called makes them able to check what books you borrow at the library or buy, incase you should be reading anything suspicious and thus be deemed a potential terrorist.
Yeah, but most of us book lovers are fans of freedom, whatever nationality we claim.
Just thinking that in the states, there’s all these outwardly unbanned books, but behind the scenes they’ve been blacklisted [in a sence banned], so I guess a week like this could be very relevant in that perspective, however, I didn’t see the site you linked mentioning the consequences of reading unbanned books that sortof are banned. I’m probably not making sense at all.
I’m not really clear about what you mean. Could you explain again?
Ok lets see if I can sort out my thoughts here. I might have gotten something wrong, but this banned book week is to celebrate the freedom to read, right? And it’s celebrated, among other countries, in the US. Buuut, the fact is that in the US, the FBI and CIA are allowed to check up on what people read [lists in libraries and bookstores] in search of terrorists. If they find that a person is reading books that are listed as, I dunno, unpatriotic books or books that a terrorist would read [on biobombs or something], they can be arrested etc for reading “suspicious litterature”. So even though you can read whatever books you want, there’s always a sence of a big brother checking up on you if you should happen to read books in the “suspicious litterature” category. I think this law even says that the people being checked don’t have the right to know they’re being checked. Sooo, it’s like a new and different way of, well not banning, but controlling what people should read, and I would’ve thought it’d be mentioned somewhere on the webpage. Did that make more sense? I doubt it đ
Yeah, the patriot act is terrible and unjustified, I agree. The site likely should mention that, but I believe it tried to focus more on the books themselves, and show how misguided people have been about them in the past and even today.