Banned Books Week

“A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.” 
― Ellen Hopkins

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week. For those of you unfamiliar with the bookish tradition, it's a week to celebrate the freedom to read whatever you choose. Unfortunately, the vast majority of banned books are those written for children, which is what makes raising awareness such an important issue.

Censorship and parenting can become a tangled web, and everyone certainly has an opinion. It takes very little to spark "parenting wars", since having someone question your parenting decisions often cuts to the heart of many parents' own fears and insecurities.

While every individual certainly has the right to parent how he or she sees fit, the fact that the same books keep popping up on Banned Book Lists year after year, never fails, both as a parent and as a person, to make me upset. While we all have different methods and different values, I'm confident in saying that, as parents, what we truly want is for our children to grow into thoughtful, engaged adults who can successfully navigate the world without our help. In order to do so, they need to be able to make their own mistakes, form their own opinions, and experience what the world has to offer, both positive and negative. Cutting them off from literature that highlights the (admittedly sometimes upsetting) true breadth of human experience just seems counterintuitive.

But Banned Books Week is about more than something as limited as parental condemnation - it's about revolting against a system that believes it has the right to limit a person's literary choices. Because even if you believe that parents have the right to decide what their children do and don't read (an interesting post for another day, I'm sure!), no institution should be able to make that decision for them. The fact that books can be banned for reasons such as "offensive language" (according to whom?!) or "homosexuality" (seriously?!) is not only upsetting, it's criminal.

So in honour of Banned Books Week, I'd love to share a few of my favourites, and to hear about those you are reading. Do you make a point to read something that is frequently challenged during this week? Will you share that tradition with your kids? I'd love to know :)

Personal Favourites:

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This book is painful and rewarding, raw and absolutely real. I can't wait until J and Newt are old enough to appreciate it. I also love following Alexie on twitter!

The Giver. I've been in love with this book since I read it in elementary school. It was my first foray into the now-ubiquitous dystopian genre, and it has firmly ensconced itself amongst my all-time favourites.

Looking for Alaska. I know The Fault in Our Stars gets the most attention, but this is my favourite of John Green's novels.

His Dark Materials. These are the novels that I will recommend to anyone. I recommend them to pre-teens (the protagonist is 12 years old), to teenagers, to adults. I recommend them to people who love fantasy and people who aren't quite sure. I can confidently say that they will always be in my Top Ten Favourites of all time, and I make sure to read them every few years.

How about you, lovely readers?