How to use this Page

How did comics creator Jeff Smith react when he found out the Bone series made it to the Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books?

Smith wrote about his feelings on the censorship in a guest post the Reading Rainbow website. He also talks about how much of a positive impact that reading has had on him. Here’s an excerpt:

“The worst part about my book being banned is that I hate to think of what would have happened if those Peanuts books that inspired me to become a cartoonist were taken away from me when I was a kid. I’m so grateful to have been inspired by those comics, and I’m so very lucky that I’ve had the chance to inspire other young people to try making comics of their own too.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If it’s time for Banned Books Week it’s also time for my annual bucket ‘o scorn for ALA’s  cynical exercise in spin. Like Bette Davis in Storm Center, “I’m tired. I’m tired and beaten. There’s no use pretending.” Now Davis, playing a beleaguered librarian trying to uphold the freedom to read in McCarthy’s America, was truly fighting the good fight (too bad she didn’t have a good script, though; the young boy driven mad by Red-baiters and setting fire to the library was a Bit Much). ALA, on the other hand, has simply set up its usual straw men in the form of its dramatic list of “top ten most frequently challenged books.” (The Association recorded 307 challenges in all but does not say how many challenges each book had.)

What bothers me most is the conflation of “banned” and “challenged.” Banned means the book has been removed from a library (or restricted therein), or–and less definitively to my mind–from a required or suggested reading list. Challenged means a citizen or group has ASKED a library in a “formal, written complaint” to restrict or remove a book from a library (or from a required or suggested reading list). There’s a big difference. Wouldn’t you like to know how many of these challenges resulted in banning? Beyond anecdotal evidence about some of them, ALA doesn’t tell us.

These “formal, written complaints” are generally done at the library’s behest on a form issued by that library as directed by its collection policy. Why do we get so bent out of shape when people actually use it? The answer is–and here’s the cynical part–that we don’t get bent out of shape at all, instead using these challenges to revel in our sense of cultural superiority and to raise a fund-raising alarum. No wonder ALA finds book banning something to “celebrate.”

The post Cause to celebrate? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Banned Book Week started yesterday.

For those of you who don’t know,

“Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types –- in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.” –American Library Association

Here at Lee & Low Books, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite banned/challenged titles (in no particular order).

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – banned for use of racial slurs and profanity.
2. Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling – banned for depictions of witchcraft and wizardry/the occult.
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie – banned for racism, sexually explicit language, and profanity.
4. The Kite Runner by Khaleid Hosseini– banned for depictions of homosexuality, profanity, religious viewpoints, and sexual content.
5. Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective – banned for language and “promoting homosexuality.”
6. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck– banned for profanity and sexual references.
7. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’engle – banned for offensive language and use of magic.
8. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – banned for language. 
9. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – banned for profanity, racial slurs, and “blasphemous language”,
10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – banned for sexual content.
11. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – banned for drug usage, sexually explicit content and unsuited to age group
12. Summer of my German Soldier by Bette Greene – banned for language and racism.
13. The Giver by Lois Lowry – banned for “religious view point, suicide, unsuited to age group, and sexually explicit content.”
14. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – banned for “violence, sexually explicit content, and being unsuited to the age group.”
15. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich– banned for “drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint”
16. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things by Carolyn Mackler – banned for “offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group.”

Here are some other resources for Banned Book Week:

ALA: Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st century

Banned Books that Shaped America

Book Challenges Suppress Diversity

What is Dav Pilkey’s advice for expressing concern about a book? In the video embedded above, the creator of the Captain Underpants series live draws and explains that people should not impede others from accessing books regardless of whatever personal feelings they may have.

Pilkey hopes people will realize that widespread censorship is not the answer; the appropriate response is to remember this statement: “I don’t want my children to read this book.” What are your thoughts?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s Banned Books Week! From The American Library Association’s website: “Each year, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a list of the top ten most frequently challenged books in order to inform the public about censorship in libraries and schools. The ALA condemns censorship and works to ensure free access to information.” Based on 307 challenges, here are the top ten most challenged books of 2013.

1. Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey
   Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group, violence
2. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
4. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
   Reasons: Nudity, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: Religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group
6. A Bad Boy Can Be Good for A Girl by Tanya Lee Stone
   Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit
7. Looking for Alaska by John Green
   Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
   Reasons: drugs/alcohol/smoking, homosexuality, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
9. Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
   Reasons: Occult/Satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit
10. Bone (series) by Jeff Smith
    Reasons: Political viewpoint, racism, violence

Here’s how the Horn Book reviewed 2013′s most challenged children’s and young adult books.

The Adventures of Captain Underpants: An Epic Novel and sequels
by Dav Pilkey; illus. by the author
Intermediate     Blue Sky     124 pp.
09/97     0-590-84627-2     $16.95

Best friends and fellow pranksters George and Harold create a comic book superhero, Captain Underpants, and hypnotize their school principal into assuming his identity. Clad in cape and jockey shorts, Principal Krupp foils bank robbers and a mad scientist until the boys “de-hypnotize” him. Written in a tongue-in-cheek style and illustrated with suitably cartoonish drawings, the story is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. PETER D. SIERUTA
reviewed in the Spring 1998 Horn Book Guide

 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie; illus. by Ellen Forney
Middle School, High School     Little     232 pp.
9/07     978-0-316-01368-0     $16.99     g

The line between dramatic monologue, verse novel, and standup comedy gets unequivocally — and hilariously and  triumphantly — bent in this novel about coming of age on the rez. Urged on by a math teacher whose nose he has just  broken, Junior, fourteen, decides to make the iffy commute from his Spokane Indian reservation to attend high school in Reardan, a small town twenty miles away. He’s tired of his impoverished circumstances (“Adam and Eve covered their  privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands”), but while he hopes his new school will offer him a better education, he knows the odds aren’t exactly with him: “What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other Indian in town?” But he makes friends (most notably the class dork  Gordy), gets a girlfriend, and even (though short, nearsighted, and slightly disabled from birth defects) lands a spot on the varsity basketball team, which inevitably leads to a showdown with his own home team, led by his former best friend Rowdy. Junior’s narration is intensely alive and rat-a-tat-tat with short paragraphs and one-liners (“If God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs”). The dominant mode of the novel is comic, even though  there’s plenty of sadness, as when Junior’s sister manages to shake off depression long enough to elope — only to die,  passed out from drinking, in a fire. Junior’s spirit, though, is unquenchable, and his style inimitable, not least in the take-no-prisoners cartoons he draws (as expertly depicted by comics artist Forney) from his bicultural experience. ROGER SUTTON
reviewed in the September/October 2007 Horn Book Magazine

The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
Middle School, High School    Scholastic     374 pp.
10/08     978-0-439-02348-1     $17.99

Survivor meets “The Lottery” as the author of the popular Underland Chronicles returns with what promises to be an even better series. The United States is no more, and the new Capitol, high in the Rocky Mountains, requires each district to send two teenagers, a boy and a girl, to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a reality show from which only one of the twenty-four participants will emerge victorious — and alive. When her younger sister is chosen by lottery to represent their district, Katniss volunteers to go in her stead, while Peeta, who secretly harbors a crush on Katniss, is the boy selected to join her. A fierce, resourceful competitor who wins the respect of the other participants and the viewing public, Katniss also displays great compassion and vulnerability through her first-person narration. The plot is front and center here — the twists and turns are addictive, particularly when the romantic subplot ups the ante — yet the Capitol’s oppression and exploitation of the districts always simmers just below the surface, waiting to be more fully explored in future volumes. Collins has written a compulsively readable blend of science fiction, survival story, unlikely romance, and social commentary. JONATHAN HUNT
reviewed in the September/October 2008 Horn Book Magazine

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl
by Tanya Lee Stone
High School     Lamb/Random     227 pp.
1/06     0-385-74702-0     $14.95     g
Library edition 0-385-90946-2     $16.99

“Stupid / humiliated / foolish / stung / heartbroken / pissed off / and a little / bit / wiser.” High school freshman Josie sums up how she feels after falling for an only-out-for-one-thing senior, and she isn’t alone. The three (very different) teen girl narrators in this candid free-verse novel form a chorus of varied perspectives on how a “bad boy” — the same boy for all three — causes them to lose control before they even realize what’s happening. Stone’s portrayal of the object of their (dis)affection is stereotyped, but the three girls are distinct characters, and she conveys the way the girls’ bodies and brains respond to the unnamed everyjerk in electrically charged (and sexually explicit) detail. Finally returning to her senses, Josie decides to post warnings about her ex in the back of the school library’s copy of Judy Blume’s Forever…because “every girl reads it eventually.” Others add their own caveats in a reassuring show of sisterhood. As this scribbled “support group” illustrates, even the most careful and self-aware among us sometimes gets bitten by the snake in the grass. CHRISTINE M. HEPPERMAN
reviewed in the January/February 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Looking for Alaska
by John Green
High School     Dutton     237 pp.
3/05     0-525-47506-0     $15.99      g

A collector of famous last words, teenage Miles Halter uses Rabelais’s final quote (“I go to seek a Great Perhaps”) to  explain why he’s chosen to leave public high school for Culver Creek Preparatory School in rural Alabama. In his case, the Great Perhaps includes challenging classes, a hard-drinking roommate, elaborate school-wide pranks, and Alaska Young, the enigmatic girl rooming five doors down. Moody, sexy, and even a bit mean, Alaska draws Miles into her schemes,  defends him when there’s trouble, and never stops flirting with the clearly love-struck narrator. A drunken make-out session ends with Alaska’s whispered “To be continued?” but within hours she’s killed in a car accident. In the following weeks, Miles and his friends investigate Alaska’s crash, question the possibility that it could have been suicide, and  acknowledge their own survivor guilt. The narrative concludes with an essay Miles writes about this event for his religion class — an unusually heavy-handed note in an otherwise mature novel, peopled with intelligent characters who talk smart, yet don’t always behave that way, and are thus notably complex and realistically portrayed teenagers. PETER D. SIERUTA
reviewed in the March/April 2005 Horn Book Magazine

Bone: Out from Boneville and sequels
by Jeff Smith; illus. by Jeff Smith and Steve Hamaker
Intermediate     Scholastic/Graphix     140 pp.
2/05     0-439-70623-8     $18.95

When greedy Phoney Bone is run out of town, his cousins, Fone and Smiley, join him. Fone makes friends with a country girl, her no-nonsense gran’ma, and a dragon; Phoney must contend with ferocious rat creatures who are led by a mysterious “hooded one” and who want Phoney’s soul. This graphic novel (originally published in comic-book form) is slow paced but nevertheless imaginative. MARK ADAM
reviewed in the Fall 2005 Horn Book Guide

Are you reading any banned books this week?

The post Banned Books Week 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Judy Platt with Salman Rushdie, Sept 2004

Judy Platt is celebrating her 35th anniversary at The Association of American Publishers. The organization honored Platt with a lunch in DC today. As Director, Free Expression Advocacy, Platt heads up the AAP’s Freedom to Read Committee and the AAP’s International Freedom to Publish Committee.

In her tenure with the group, Platt has led the AAP’s advocacy work against book censorship since before Banned Books Week started 32 years ago. She has been the AAP’s liaison with Banned Books Weeks since the movement began. During that time, Platt has seen book censorship movements evolve.

“I’d say that  in my early years at AAP the majority of censorship was focused on sexually explicit materials, or ‘pornography’ and efforts were  made to keep such materials away from adults as well as minors on the questionable assumption that access to such materials resulted in anti-social behavior,” she told GalleyCat via email. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression will celebrate Banned Books Week from September 21st to September 27th.

The organization plans to shine a spotlight on graphic novels and comics. Judith Platt, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee, had this statement in a press release: “This year we spotlight graphic novels because, despite their serious literary merit and popularity as a genre, they are often subject to censorship.”

The American Library Association recently revealed the top ten list of most frequently challenged books for this year. Jeff Smith’s comic series, Bone, occupies the #10 spot. Earlier this year, Smith designed the cover for Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Banned Books Week Handbook. Follow this link to access a free digital copy. Check out the entire list after the jump.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Next week is Banned Books Week and to help you celebrate, the Associate of American Publishers has put together a list of ways to participate in the celebration of censored book titles. AAP members Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Scholastic and Simon & Schuster have each created a way to help readers engage in the event, whose goal it is to promote the freedom to read.

Hachette is calling readers to share how a banned book has impacted their lives on the HBG Facebook page. HarperCollins is supporting online discussion forums on Epic Reads which will encourage discussions around banned books. Macmillan has created a website dedicated to The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander and Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden, two previously banned books. Penguin Young Readers Group is encouraging readers to share selfies of themselves holding up a sign that reads, “I celebrate #BannedBooksWeek because …” and will give away prizes to participants. The publisher will also join in several #BannedBooksWeekTwitter chats during the week. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Prisons across Canada are cutting back on inmate access to libraries. This unfortunate occurrence is the result of overcrowded prisons (which makes it difficult to move prisoners around) and budget cuts, which limit reading materials.

CBC News has the scoop: “Last year, the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert, Sask., didn’t extend a contract with the region’s library service, shutting down access for inmates. The library was open five days per week in the afternoons and evenings and inmates would borrow, on average, about 50 items per day. The program cost about $70,000 a year.”

Canadian prisoners aren’t the only inmates having issues obtaining books. British justice ministers have recently made it more difficult for prisoners in England and Wales to have family and friends send them books.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Grocery store chain Aldi has pulled Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book Revolting Rhymes from bookshelves in its stores in Australia after a customer complained  on Facebook that the book includes the word ‘slut.’

“Poor Cindy’s heart was torn to shreds. My Prince! she thought. He chops off heads! How could I marry anyone who does that sort of thing for fun? The Prince cried, ‘Who’s this dirty slut? Off with her nut! Off with her nut!’,”  reads the nursery rhyme.

The store’s move has caused an uproar among Aldi customers, who have been commenting negatively about the censorship on the store’s Facebook page. “Is it true that you withdrew Roald Dahl’s ‘Revolting Rhymes’ (an all-time classic from one of the world’s most popular children’s authors EVER) after ONE complaint? SHAME, ALDI, SHAME!,” wrote one Facebook user. “It is on every public library shelf, and in most schools. No one HAS to read it or buy it – don’t show ignorance and weakness by depriving other customers.” (Via The Guardian).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Banned Books Week is right around the corner. This year the celebration of censored books will take place from September 21st to 27th.

To celebrate, designer Anne Simon has create a t-shirt promoting the event and is selling them on Zazzle for $37.95 each. The t-shirsts come in a variety of colors and styles.

For more information about Banned Books Week, check out our post How to Participate in Banned Books Week.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A school district in Maryland has placed an 8th grade English teacher on administrative leave after finding out that the teacher had written two works of fiction which dealt with the subject of school shootings.

Patrick McLaw, published two books under the pseudonym Dr. K.S. Voltaer – The Insurrectionist and Lilith’s Heir. The books deal with a fictitious high school shooting set in the year 2902 in which 947 people are killed.

McLaw is not allowed on campus until the school and local law enforcement investigate the matter. Here is more from RT.com:

“While on administrative leave, he is not allowed to come onto school property or participate in school events,” the statement continues. “Mr. McLaw’s teaching duties have been assigned to qualified personnel to insure the smooth transition of students into the fall semester.” Additionally, Wager wrote that an officer from the Cambridge Police Department will be at Mace’s Lane middle school “for as long as we deem it necessary.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Banned Books Week (BBW) is coming up next month and the American Booksellers Foundation For Free Expression is encouraging booksellers, librarians, authors, publishers and teachers to get involved.

The theme of this year’s event, which runs Sept. 21-27, is the censorship of graphic novels and comic books. Booksellers are encouraged to promote specific banned titles. Here is more information on how booksellers can participate:

Booksellers have always played a key role in Banned Books Week by creating displays that show customers that some of their favorite books are under attack. For the second year, ABFFE and Ingram Content Group are making it easy for booksellers to mount their displays by distributing a free promotional kit that contains everything they need. To qualify, booksellers choose 30 or more titles from 450 banned and challenged titles listed on Ingram’s iPage. They also receive additional discounts on initial and subsequent orders.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A pastor in Ohio has filed a complaint about vampire books in the YA section of his local library and asked that the titles be removed. Rachel Mead’s Blood Promise, Matsuri Hino’s Vampire Knight and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series were all cited in his complaint.

Pastor Phillip Missick claims that the titles are “dark,” “sexual” and “dangerous for our kids.” ABC News has more:

Cleveland City Manager Kelly McDonald declined an interview but we have Library Director, Mary Cohn’s response to Missick’s complaint, as well as to a petition he had signed by a handful of local pastors. She noted only five percent of all the 1,500 titles in the teen section deal with occult, vampires and the supernatural, and then spoke to the mission of a public library saying materials should not be chosen or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

British justice ministers have defended their push to prevent prisoners in England and Wales from having family and friends send them books.

They argue that prisoners can earn the right to buy books through the prison’s book selling program through a new ”incentives and earned privileges” regime.

The Guardian has more: “Justice ministry officials say lifting the ban on sending in books would undermine the basis of the new regime. The prisons minister, Jeremy Wright, said: ‘The notion that we are banning books in prisons is complete nonsense. All prisoners can have up to 12 books in their cells at any one time, and all prisoners have access to the prison library. ‘Under the incentives and earned privileges scheme, if prisoners engage with their rehabilitation and comply with the regime, they can have greater access to funds to buy items, including books.’”

Writers have called the move barbaric, stressing the importance of reading as part of a prisoner’s rehabilitation.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

George Orwell’s 1984 has become an object of controversy in Thailand.

Thrillist reports that tourists encountered a warning in a travel guide; displaying Orwell’s book in public could mark a reader as an “anti-coup protester.” In fact, a public screening of the 1984 movie adaptation was recently cancelled because the police had informed the organizers that their event would be considered an illegal political assembly.

Here’s more from The Bangkok Post: “One form of resistance to the coup has been ‘reader’ – individuals or small groups sitting on public walkways reading Orwell’s novel. Last week, protesters unfurled a giant poster of Gen Prayuth’s face with the words ‘Thailand 1984′ written below. Opponents of the new regime claim the book’s depiction of a dystopian state where authorities exert absolute control over the lives of citizens compares with Thailand today.”

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The National Library Board of Singapore has stopped plans to destroy and remove children’s books featuring gay and lesbian characters from its shelves. While one of the three banned titles has already been destroyed, the other two will not be destroyed and will instead be moved to an adult section of the library.

NBC News has more: “‘I have also asked NLB to review the process by which they deal with such books,” [Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob] Ibrahim said. The library had previously said that the books went against ‘social norms’, with the majority of Singaporeans appearing to be against same-sex relationships.”

The books in question include: And Tango Makes Three; The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption; and Who’s In My Family: All About Our Families. It is not clear, which book was destroyed and which remain.

The change of heart comes after fierce opposition to the ban from activists on Twitter with the hashtag #FreeMyLibrary, as well as an open letter criticizing the decision published online which collected thousands of signatures.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The government of Singapore has banned children’s books featuring gay and lesbian characters.

The regime has required the National Library Board (NLB) to destroy three children’s books including: And Tango Makes Three; The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption; and Who’s In My Family: All About Our Families.

TIME has more: “The ban was reportedly spurred by a complaint from a single library user who is also a member of the Facebook group “We Are Against Pinkdot in Singapore.” The NLB boasts a collection of more than five million books and audio-visual materials, and a spokesperson toldChannel News Asia that it acts on less than a third of the 20 or so removal requests received each year. (James Patterson’s Kill Me If You Can, which depicts incest, was the subject of a complaint but remains on the shelves.)”

The ban has prompted outrage from activists who have taken to Twitter to express their dismay with the decision using the hashtag #FreeMyLibrary. In addition, activists have written a letter criticizing the decision, which collected 4,600 signatures as of 8:00am on July 10th.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I was very sorry to read that Nancy Garden died on Monday. While she wrote in just about every children’s-book genre there is, it’s Annie on My Mind that made her immortal, and led to her parallel, equally admirable, career as a defender of intellectual freedom in libraries and communities across the nation.

The first starred review I ever wrote was for Annie, for SLJ back in 1982. I revisited the book twenty-five years later for the Horn Book.

The post Thanks for Annie, Nancy. appeared first on The Horn Book.

from the English National Opera production of The Death of Klinghoffer

The Metropolitan Opera’s cancellation of the announced HD broadcast of The Death of Klinghoffer is galling for a number of reasons. The Met’s decision to stage the opera (albeit with a note in the program by Leon Klinghoffer’s daughters, who have condemned the work as anti-Semitic)  but not broadcast it will please nobody. It is also alarming to see Met General Manager Peter Gelb cave so easily, especially in light of his reaction to those who, because of Russia’s anti-gay antics, protested the Met’s opening night performance last year of Eugene Onegin, featuring Putin supporters Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev:

We stand against the significant human rights abuses that take place every day in many countries. But as an arts institution, the Met is not the appropriate vehicle for waging nightly battles against the social injustices of the world.

He was right then and therefore he’s wrong now. But if you are still with me and not wondering when this blog turned into Parterre Box, the cynical and specious reasoning Gelb gives for the cancellation of the broadcast is exactly what libraries hear every damn time somebody challenges a book:

I’m convinced that the opera is not anti-Semitic,” said the Met’s General Manager, Peter Gelb. “But I’ve also become convinced that there is genuine concern in the international Jewish community that the live transmission of The Death of Klinghoffer would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.

Censors are almost never worried about the dangers poised by a book to themselves, or to their own invariably brilliant children. They worry about other children. Even leaving aside Gelb’s attempt to grease himself out of the argument and blame it on the Jews, the idea that somehow unthinking anti-Semitic hordes were going to attend an HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera across Europe and then–well, and then what, exactly? Censors are also never very clear about just what they expect to happen to people upon reading or viewing an objectionable work. But apparently Americans with enough cash to attend a live Met performance of this opera will be fine; it’s those Other People we have to worry about. It’s ALWAYS the Other People they’re worried about.

The post This is not just about opera appeared first on The Horn Book.

The principal of a Pensacola, FL-based high school has cancelled its One School/One Book summer reading program citing concerns that the approved reading assignment promoted hacker culture. Students were going to read Cory Doctorow's bestselling YA novel Little Brother, but the school pulled the book after receiving complaints from parents. Doctorow blogged about the issue on BoingBoing: In an email conversation with Ms Griffith, the principal cited reviews that emphasized the book's positive view of questioning authority, lauding "hacker culture", and discussing sex and sexuality in passing. He mentioned that a parent had complained about profanity (there's no profanity in the book, though there's a reference to a swear word). In short, he made it clear that the book was being challenged because of its politics and its content." In response, Doctorow made the above video in which he explains that he and his publisher Tor Books are donating books directly to the students.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wikipasta, a community writing site dedicated to horror stories, has defended itself after two preteens viciously stabbed their friend claiming they were inspired by Slenderman mythology. Slenderman is a fictional character was created as part of a "paranormal pictures" contest hosted by the Something Awful forums in 2009, according to KnowYourMeme. He is featured in tons of fan fiction online and known for his tall thin demeanor and excessively long appendages. After calls to shut down or censor the site, Wikipasta has pointed out that all works on the site are fiction. "This is an isolated incident, and does not represent or attribute the Creepypasta community as a whole," explained an administrator in a post on the site. "This wiki does not endorse or advocate for the killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A Tennessee school district has banned British author Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time for its use of profanity. The Wilson County School Board in Tennesee pulled the mystery novel, which is about an autistic teenager investigating the death of his neighbor's dog, from a 9th grade reading list this week. The Tennesseean reports: "The board voted 3-1 to remove the book from the list of approved reading in the school district. One board member was absent. 'The F-bomb is pretty common in that book, and that’s what I have a problem with,' said board member Wayne McNeese, who received complaints about the book from some of his constituents. 'I’m not dumb enough to think students don’t hear that language, but it doesn’t mean we should promote it.'"

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Perfectly Normal, a middle school sexual education digital textbook by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, is has received some complaints from parents in Missouri.

The book shows graphic representations of people having sex, which is leading some local parents to petition to have the eBook removed from a school library in the Francis Howell School District. USA Today has the story:

District officials say “it was determined to keep the ebook available as a resource for check-out in the library. If a parent determines that he/she does not want to their child to have access to certain materials, we honor that request.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.