Julia's comments (member since Jul 30, 2008)

Julia's comments from the Banned Books group.

"Wit" is a Tony- Award winning play about a woman professor with breast cancer.

Emma Thompson did the (tv? PBS?) movie based on it.

I'll check out the strip online. Thanks for the tip, Chris!

See, I would *teach* _The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian_ in a second, but not put it on a summer reading list. Same with Alexie's also amazing YA book _Flight_. IMO, these are better, richer, with teacher- guidance and student discussion, or flip that. But how much do you suppose that other book is/ was being read with parents objecting to this one?!

A long time ago Pandora Kat you recommened Walter Dean Myers' books instead. His books are often on banned/ challenged lists...

Chris Crutcher's book from 2005 _Sledding Hill_ is a book without any swear words or anything else that could be easily banned. But still it has been managed.
The below are some reviews I found on Chris Crutcher's website, which has the catchy name chriscrutcher.com

"I swear, Chris Crutcher is writing himself into my heart even as he’s writing himself into his own books! As it details the life history of a banned book from a teenager’s perspective, The Sledding Hill is a brilliant chronicle about censorship in literature and its effect on personal freedom. But this book speaks to my heart because it’s a story about undying friendship and the vast capacity for reasoning in the most unreasonable kids. I can’t think of a better kick in the pants to launch the Wild Rumpus Banned Book Club."
Collette Morgan, Wild Rumpus Books
2005 Summer BookSense Pick

"THE SLEDDING HILL is as important as it is enjoyable to read."
TeenReads.com, May 10, 2005

"Crutcher turns crusader in this story of a boy who has lost too much to let a book be taken away from him."
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June 2005

"Some folks will say this book is all about censorship and the fight for intellectual freedom. Others will talk about its examination of death and loss. Still others might notice the discussion about what makes for a good book or a good teacher. It touches on conflict and the nature of disagreement and how polarizing people never accomplishes anything."
Teri Lesesne, The Goddess of YA Lit
http://www.livejournal.com/users/profess...

"...there are going to be a bunch of huffing, puffing, scowling preachers when they start getting an earful of Billy Bartholomew. But they're going to have a bit of a problem deep-sixing this baby. Crutcher's written a book without ANY 'naughty' words. Not a single f-word, sh-word, n-word, b-word, or a-h word. If they want to ban THE SLEDDING HILL from school libraries, they're going to have to get it banned because of Billy Bartholomew's blatantly blasphemous revelations."
Richie Partington, Richie's Picks
February 22, 2005

(And Crutcher has a new book coming out in July 2009.)

Oh! If you've read this much Nancy Garden also has a novel on book banning The Year They Burned the Books.

Julia

It's been years since I read it as well, but thematically, utopian societies by their nature are dystopian.

Why that would cause banning I can't say. Perhaps if there were a true utopia then one wouldn't yearn for heaven?

P.S. Ursula K. LeGuin has a short story with very similar themes to the The Giver "Those that Walk with the Omelas."

Julia

I'd like to recommend and add The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Chbosky. (Think that's his last name.)

Of Mice and Men is frequently taught to 9th- 10th graders in my area. Grapes of Wrath is taught to seniors, generally. I've seen The Chocolate War by Cormier on my state's curriculum list, but don't remember his Fade being there. Another author's Fade? Call of the Wild, really?

I worked in a private school where the principal forbade me to continue teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream. The kids were getting it, enjoying it, but she couldn't, also she wouldn't sit in on the lessons, so I had to stop teaching it.

Is that banning? The school had five classes and she was a woman with more authority than sense, for whom I never should worked.

Like TeraD, I am a special education teacher. Unlike him, I teach primarily high school students. Like him, in my last three years I have taught all subjects to my students, they are classified as emotionally disturbed. The first year I was teaching at a private special education school, that was funded with public dollars. Then I taught at a public regional program located at a public high school.
My students *were* bored; they expected not to be engaged in their own educations. Hopefully, I taught them differently. That was certainly my intent.
I taught Midsummer, Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet all toward performance. I also taught Whale Talk, Speak, Night, The Hobbit, The Outsiders, Kindred, Mountains of Mourning, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, and other books, poetry & short stories in an effort to reach my students. Since I had small classes I taught the books that I could acquire through the school library system or through my public library system or I could find online for free. I had to have students' parents sign permission slips for some books at my administration's request. My students *liked* reading books with potty- mouthed characters.
I also have a 1000+ mostly used books in my classroom library, mostly YA, science fiction fantasy and horror, and required students to read a book outside of the ones assigned each quarter and write a one page paper on it.

I googled Olive's Ocean. This is from an Amazon list of banned books and why.

"challenged for containing issues related to growing up and adolescence such as death and puberty."

The list of *why* books are banned and/ or challenged is disturbing.

Julia

Yes, George's treatment of Lennie at the end is difficult to bear, but OM&M gets banned/ challenged because the Stable Buck (he and & Curly's Wife are the only ones without *names*) is repeatedly called the "n-word." Less now, but Curly's Wife is called a tramp and something else, that my students couldn't get as a putdown.

There's a new book out about the banning of _The Grapes of Wrath_ in Kern County, (Bakersfield) CA. Where it may still be banned. The people who ran the town/ ran the farms/ ran everything didn't like how Steinbeck portrayed them.

From the Top 10 books I've read:
* The Chocolate War
* The Color Purple
* I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
* It's Perfectly Normal
* Perks of Being a Wallflower
Top Authors I've read:
* Mark Twain
* Robert Cormier
* Toni Morrison
* Lois Lowry
* Chris Crutcher

Jennie,

Last year I was pleased to see that the library system for the school I was teaching 9th graders had Octavia E. Butler's _Kindred_. It's a novel about slavery in the American South with a hero/ protagonist from 1976. So she, like my students, doesn't have any clue what to expect. Dana, the sometimes hero is also black, unlike Scout and her family. Her husband is white-- something the slaves cannot believe. Some of them can believe that she is a time traveler, but none of them can imagine that there will be a time when whites and blacks can marry. It's an amazing book by an amazing writer-- who won a Mac Arthur genius grant-- and died a few years ago.

I also like Monster by Walter Dean Myers, Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher and Flight &/ or the Absolutely True Adventures of a Part- Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Night by Elie Wiesel, "Mountains of Mourning"- not about racial discrimination but physical disability and discrimination by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Diane, I was having a similar conversation elsewhere and taking the opposite side about the historical fiction Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and all its sequels. There, I really like the detail because I know very little about that time and place. *And I want to know about that detail.* Gabaldon has complained bitterly about her abridged audiobooks. If I remember correctly, it's something like 30% of the book makes it into the abridged version. About To Kill a Mockingbird, I read that as a book to teach -- for high school students who are poor and disinterested readers. I recall that there is a long scene about a neighbor of the Finches being addicted to laudunum, kicking the addiction and dying clean. It added nothing to the story, for me.

Similarly, I didn't care for To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, I like the movie better. There's too much extraneous in the novel, in my opinion. There are much better novels out there about racial discrimation.

HOWEVER, I recognize that this is *my* opinion. I know that most people have a very different opinion.

Most Shakespeare plays are very cut or abridged when we see them onstage or on film. Gibson's, Hawke's and Olivier's Hamlets on film were very different than Branagh's. Branagh did not cut his Hamlet at all. He was nominated (won?) an Academy award for adapting Shakespeare-- that he changed not at all.

There are good reasons to cut a piece of literature as people have said here: for children, for people who like their fiction abridged, for the "book on tape," for film.

Abridging isn't anything like banning, IMO.

But, The Bible?

Why? Wha?

How can History/ Literature be taught with out it?

I am a HS special education teacher and go out of my way to teach banned and challenged books. These are books that are on my state's curriculum and are the books that my students -- who've not typically had a lot of success with reading-- enjoy.
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is on the list for the portrayl of Lennie, the sexual situations in the book, (quite racy for 1936) the language, including -- and no one else has mentioned this-- what the black stable buck is called.
My students understand it as history.

I don't send home a permission slip for this book, as I do for some others.

The other reason, I believe, that Steinbeck is so often challenged & banned is that he treats his working class protagonists as heroes. That is still difficult for many in America.