The Thin Red Line

Suicide is not an easy subject to tackle in a novel,  so I have to give Jay Asher credit for coming up with a creative way of doing so, even though Thirteen Reasons Why  (a current Young Adult release from Razor Bill Books, a Penguin imprint) left me somewhat frustrated and less than fully satisfied.     Clay Jensen is a nice guy.    A high school senior, in the running for valedictorian,  he is frankly puzzled to learn that his classmate Hannah Baker has committed suicide and then both fascinated and appalled when he receives a battered shoe box containing seven audio cassette tapes recorded by his dead classmate.   The tapes purport to explain Hannah’s reasons for committing suicide to the people she feels are responsible.   And Clay has no idea at all how it is he made that list.

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Welcome to Banned Books Week 2008 on The Thin Red Line!   Continuing today with the top ten "most challenged" books of 2007,  today I am featuring Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (number 8 ) and Lauren Myracle’s ttyl (number 7).   I believe that I first read Caged Bird when I worked for Waldenbooks on Canal Street in New Orleans in the mid–late 1980’s.  This first of six volumes of auto-biography which Angelou penned regarding her earliest years is a haunting and engaging tale which begins with Angelou and her brother being sent as a toddler to live with her grandparents in Stamps, Arkansas.   Challenged by her friend James Baldwin to write biography as literature, Angelou (who is also a gifted dancer and poet) completely rises to the task and tells her life story as a novel.   This book has been the subject of censorship efforts pretty much since its 1970 publication.    It is listed at number 5 on a list of the ten most banned books of the twenty-first century (2001–2006)  and was number three on the list of most challenged books 1990–2000.   If you haven’t already,  do click on the title or the cover to buy the book or fetch it from your library.   I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings– Highly Recommended

By contrast, Lauren Myracle’s ttyl,  a novel about three high school sophmores, girls who are best friends,  just didn’t work to me.   At just over 200 pages, the novel, which is presented entirely as a series of Instant Messages between the three two-somes and occasional chat room where all three young ladies are present,  contains at least 190 too many pages of "IM Speak" (u for you, ur for your, l8r, for later, etc, etc ad nauseam) for my tastes.   While I can see why teenagers and particularly teen aged girls would enjoy this story,   the endless IM Speak  really got on my nerves after awhile.   Not Recommended.

And in response to Book Calendar,  who left a very insightful comment to yesterday’s post,   I certainly agree that authors have sometimes actively courted the publicity boost that can come with the threat of censorship.  OTOH,  I haven’t really noticed the controversial titles being especially subject to theft,  though I will confess to sometimes hiding Ann Colter or Tim LaHaye in the overflow shelves.   (shhhh,  don’t tell).    What seems to me to be much more frequently stolen are audio CD’s and movie DVD’s,  the empty boxes of which I sometimes find when doing pickups.

For reasons I am unable to determine,  the full post page for this post is not functioning at this time.    Will fix ASAP.

Welcome to Banned Books Week 2008 on The Thin Red Line!    Each fall the American Library Association leads the observance of Banned Books Week, celebrating Americans’ freedom to read by reminding people of the importance of this basic right.    Each year,  the ALA publishes a list of the previous calendar year’s most "challenged" books.   (A challenge is an instance where a school or library is presented with a demand that a particular book not be made available.)   This year in observance of Banned Books Week, I will be writing about the 2007 "10 Most Challenged Books"  two each day,  Monday–Friday.    I return to daily posting today after largely taking a hiatus from blogging this month.

The tenth most-challenged book in 2007 was Stephen Chabosky’s  The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.  This novel has been favorably compared to such classics as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye and John Knowles’  A Separate Peace.    The novel is presented as a series of letters to someone who is addressed only as "Dear friend,"  and the first letter explains to the recipient that the author is someone he does not know,  and that you have to tell everything to someone, and so the author, Charlie, has chosen for his own reasons to tell everything in this correspondence.   We follow along as Charlie, a small guy who’s a very effective fighter when provoked, befriends brother and sister Patrick (nick name "Nothing") and Samantha, the leaders of a kind of Not Popular clique, and seniors at High School where Charlie is a freshman.   It is a beautifully told take of friendship and youth by a narrator who comes across as someone with serious mental health problems who nonetheless seems like the sanest person there.    I read the slightly more than 200 page book in a single day and loved every word of it.   Highly Recommended.

The ninth-most challenged book of 2007 was Robie H Harris and Michael Emberley’s It’s Perfectly Normal,  an illustrated sex education manual for pubescent teens.   In looking over the book, I don’t see any overtly erotic or suggestive materials, and the tone of the text and the full color cartoon like illustrations is a blend of "matter-of-fact" and humor.   I suspect that this book was probably mostly challenged by people opposed to sex education in general, since any successful sex education manual will have to deal with all of this material.    Recommended.

Please come back again tomorrow for more of this years most challenged books.    Will you read a banned book this week?   I will be doing a post on Thursday about banned books suggested by readers of this blog, so please leave a comment and share your favorite "banned book".