Birds on the Brain

Banned Books Week, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, will be marked with displays of censored literature in thousands of libraries and bookshops across the US from 30 September. There will be a “virtual read-out”, where readers and authors name their favourite censored titles, a “50 Shades of Banned” reading of erotic literature in Manhattan, courtesy of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, and the American Library Association has named a series of titles challenged or censored over the past 30 years, from Catcher in the Rye to the Harry Potter series.

One writer, Corey Michael Dalton, is taking his celebration of banned literature to the extreme, and will be spending the week in the window of Indianapolis’s Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. “It’s about bringing attention to Banned Books Week, which has been observed [in] the last week of September every year since 1982,” he told the library. “Many people are surprised to learn that books are still actively being challenged and/or banned in the US, but it’s true. In 2011, for example, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, and The Hunger Games trilogy were all in the list of top 10 most challenged books.”

The American Library Association received 326 reports of attempts to remove books from shelves last year. This year has been no quieter, with parent protests in Tennessee leading to a ban of John Green’s award-winning novel Looking for Alaska because it “contained an awkward sexual encounter between the teenage protagonists”, and Amy Timberlake’s acclaimed picture book The Dirty Cowboy drawing protests in Pennsylvania for including an image of the cowboy taking a bath. “The parents’ complaint rested on the idea that: ‘Children may come to the conclusion that looking at nudity is OK, and therefore pornography is OK’,” said the National Coalition Against Censorship at the time. “When we hear individuals call drawings of a partially nude bather ‘obscene’ and ‘pornographic’, it becomes clear that the instinct to censor is alive and well in this country.”

Author and librarian James Klise, meanwhile, has spoken out about the withdrawal of his invitation to speak at a Kansas library – ironically enough during Banned Books Week itself. “I received a second email from the librarian. She hated to say it, but I probably was not a good fit for their event after all. She explained that she works in a very conservative community,” Klise wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “After some consideration, she and her principal decided that my first young-adult novel, called Love Drugged, about a closeted gay teen, might be too edgy for some parents there.”

Klise said the withdrawal of his invitation would make sure the Banned Books Week celebration at his Chicago library would be “less light-hearted” than it has been in the past. “Most people truly do believe in the freedom to read. Diversity and respecting individuality are standard practice here. Maybe that’s what compelled me to write the essay for the Tribune – to convey my surprise and sadness at the experience with the Kansas school, and to acknowledge how good I have it in Chicago,” he told the Guardian. “I guess I’ve always assumed that my book gets less exposure in conservative parts of the country. I should add that the Kansas librarian was extremely torn about rescinding the invitation. She wrote to me that she was sick to her stomach about it, and I empathise with her predicament. I suspect it happens all the time.”