Banned Books Week 2015!

Welcome to Banned Books Week at the Library. From September 27-October 3, the Library is featuring an opportunity for the SMC community to hold, read, check out, and take a mug shot with a collection of banned or challenged books.

There are about 30 books to choose from but this is a tiny sliver of the total number of banned or challenged books in the US, and indeed, the world.  The purpose of highlighting this week is to make you reflect on why books and ideas are challenged, and hopefully to also inspire you to read a banned or challenged book!  

Books are banned or challenged for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with being unfit for minor children.  Such titles include the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Origin of Species by Darwin.  Others are suppressed by legal authorities because they are "indecent" or "lewd."  These include Moll Flanders and Ulysses.

Come by the Library, choose a book that you have read or intend to read, and get your mug shot taken with it.  Be sure and tag the image #smclibrary and #bannedbooksweek.  Here are some images taken on the first day.

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

--Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1953)

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

--Noam Chomsky as quoted in The Big Little Book of Jewish Wit & Wisdom (2000)