Because I have a 9-week-old baby, I’ve spent a lot of time this Banned Books Week holding her and scrolling one-handed on the tablet or the phone. Sometimes I come across a Banned Books post or article from somewhere and I share it in my Facebook page. A few days ago, I shared a picture of one of my former coworkers posing mug-shot style with a Harry Potter book. She’s the director at a college library and they wrote up a funny little snipped about her having been “caught” reading banned books.
Normally, when I share someone else’s post like this, I offer a few words of why I find it interesting, provide context, etc. But, when posting one-handing, it’s a lot easier to just click “share” and not type anything. That’s what I did for this one. One of my friends commented along the lines of “Wait a minute, is banning books still a thing? What is this, the 1600’s?” I went back and explained what was going on in the picture.
Now I’m not sure if he genuinely misunderstood, or if he was being sarcastic himself and I didn’t catch it. But the answer to his question is, yes, this still is a thing. People are not getting thrown in jail over the books they read, of course, but there are still many, many attempts (some successful) to remove books from public access. Read more about that here:
https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2018/9/29/speak-out-write-out-read-out
(You can tell I wrote the blog in the above link a few years ago, as I refer to not having kids and having plenty of time to read…)