Enjoy the illicit thrill of forbidden things — read a banned book today!





The list of authors who have had their books banned, long and diverse, includes to name just a few: J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Aristophanes, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Stephen King, Walt Whitman, Thomas Paine, Lewis Carroll and George Orwell.

The Online Book Place (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu) reports that The Bible and The Quran were both removed from numerous libraries and banned from import in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1956. Many editions of the Bible have also been banned and burned by civil and religious authorities throughout history. Some recent examples: On July 1, 1996, Singapore convicted a woman for possessing the Jehovah's Witness translation of the Bible.

Banned Books Week, September 26−October 3, is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress.

Read all about this important celebration of the freedom to read at bannedbooksweek.org.

Click here to see a map of book bans and challenges in the US from 2007 to 2009.

From the site:

Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982. The challenges have occurred in every state and in hundreds of communities. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups—or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore the latest problems to classic and beloved works of American literature.