Freedom to Read Week

Can you believe I forgot Freedom to Read Week? After years of making displays in the school library and coming up with all sorts of contests, I forgot. It slipped by! I didn’t even release a banned or challenged book out into the wild using BookCrossing! Oh no!

I did however participate in a discussion over on AgentQuery about sex, sex scenes and in the end, self censorship in one’s writing. Originally it was supposed to be a sort of gender discussion, but it took a slightly different direction regarding intention with scenes in one’s work as well as the perception of others (readers, family, editors, etc).

When you think about it from a writing perspective, there are a zillion levels of censorship. The first level begins in the writer’s head. Then it moves onto the page. Then in editing. Then it moves away from the writer when agents, editors and publishers add their own levels of censorship (if deemed necessary). From there, depending on the work in question and its content, themes and language, it gets censored by the bookseller (whether to buy and sell the book or not) and then on to the reader who too, may censor it as well. I mean, have any of you ever put a book down because it offended you on some level? Did you not read a book because its content was offensive?

And how about libraries? I know as a school librarian, there were books that I censored. Books I did not buy due to inappropriateness (where exactly is the line between age appropriate and censorship) or books that I pulled from the shelves.

What about parents? Where is the line between censorship and age appropriateness?

In the end, no easy answers for censorship issues and I commend those that fight so we as individuals have the freedom to choose for ourselves.

Interesting News Stories and Harry Potter 7

Went to the movie store with dandelion’s in my hair. Forgot about it until I was in the car on the way home and caught a flash of yellow in the rear view mirror while navigating their poorly planned out parking lot.

I’ve heard some interesting things on the news lately–and I’m not a news junkie. I pretty much avoid listening to the news when I can, but here are two weird things I’ve come across in the last twenty-four hours:

A Man in the States drove 5000 miles to go burn another guy’s house down after the guy called him ‘stupid’ or some such thing over the Internet. So, anyway…never heard of turn the other cheek…

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) are taking Facebook to task. Evidently some users of Facebook are encouraging/promoting drinking and driving. According to the RCMP, encouraging someone to commit a crime, is well, bad. And you can get in trouble for that. So, sounds like MADD is going to contact Facebook so those users can be warned. It should be interesting to hear what happens…unless of course I don’t bother to follow up on the story…which is likely. It gets into the whole Freedom of Speech and all that…so it sounds tricky and interesting.

On a totally different, yet similar note…

I’ve finished reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. And can I just say this, this is not a kids book. It pains me to say it, but it isn’t. It is a SCARY book. It is FABULOUS too. Made me laugh and cry and all that. I guess what I am saying, is that there is some imagery in the book that is well…disturbing. It is incredibly well-written and everything ties in beautifully. I must say that JK Rowling’s brain must be very good at details. Yet…if they make this book straight into a movie, it would not get a ‘general’ rating, it might get a ‘PG’ rating, but if they took all the spooky stuff and fight scenes and deaths galore, it could come out more like an adventure/horror and therefore be ‘R’? I don’t know…but any kid with a great, visual imagination…well, this book could definitely scare their pants off. At the same time, it is aimed at 10-12 year old boys who LOVE having their pants scared off.

As a parent, would I restrict my daughter from reading this book? Possibly. It depends on how much she takes to heart and imagination from books once she is near an age that she would enjoy this story. This book is definitely worth reading and is valuable in that it draws parallels to things like racism and the holocaust. So, I suppose my answer is, that when my daughter is ‘ready’ maybe I’ll read it with her and we’ll talk through the story. Or maybe she won’t be interested in it.

Now as for elementary school librarians…this is going to be hard for them. It is a kids book. And a very popular author and series. But what do you do? Do you stock it? Do you restrict it to certain grades? Do they need parental permission to sign it out? It’s tough, because you don’t want to restrict the freedoms of others…yet, you also have a job to ‘protect’ kids. As a former librarian, my heart goes out to those librarians wrestling with this decision right now. There are no right answers and definitely no answers that fit like an umbrella over all circumstances.