About these ads

Banned Books Week Giveaway

Banned Books Week

Artwork courtesy of the American Library Association

Banned Books Week is an annual event put on by the ALA. Celebrate your freedom to read by reading a banned book!

The YA section of my local library is participating and asking their teen patrons to take banned book “shelfies.” You may also see banned books featured at your library this week, and the ALA is hosting other activities like a virtual read-out, Twitter party, and Google hangouts with banned/challenged authors. I support freedom to read in every way and would be pissed off if anyone in my community tried to forbid my child from reading whatever she wants.

A recently challenged book is Eleanor and Park (a book my own hs freshman is currently reading) and I’m sure you’ve read about the controversy. This feature at The Toast has a great overview of the situation and Q&A with Rainbow Rowell, and the original complaint can easily be found online if you’d like to read it. E&P is one of my fave books of the year, and I definitely feel it offers a lot of hope for teens going through a tough time at home, and to those who don’t fit in at school. “Obscene” is not the word I’d use to describe the book.

Ten YA and MG books that have been banned or challenged in recent years include:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

2. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

3. Looking for Alaska by John Green

4. Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz

5. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series) by Lauren Myracle

6. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins

7. What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones

8. Crank by Ellen Hopkins

9. The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

10. Lush by Natasha Friend

read banned books button

Let’s celebrate Banned Book Week with a giveaway! One winner will receive a book of their choice from this list of frequently challenged books.

Congrats to Liam who chose to win The Hunger Games!

About these ads

Posted on September 23, 2013, in Contest, Young Adult and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.

  1. Thanks for offering the giveaway to readers. Such a great event, but unfortunate that it is needed.

    Eleanor & Park…”obscene” is definitely not a word I’d use to describe it. “Necessary ” is closer to it.

    Like this

  2. I read the Diary of a Part Time Indian specifically because it was banned (and also because it sounded interesting). I can’t imagine what kind of conservative, close minded person you would have to be to think that book was in anyway inappropriate, simply because the character talks about the kinds of things that EVERY teenage boy does on a daily basis. I would definitely let my boy read that book when he gets in middle school. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t. Also, because of this book, I’m not a big Sherman Alexie fan, and he might have been someone I would have never read, otherwise. He has an amazing voice as an author and should not be discarded simply because he talks about things in a very real way.

    Like this

  3. I meant that I AM a big Sherman Alexie fan!. Durn you comment section for not letting me edit.

    Like this

  4. Thanks for the great giveaway!

    Like this

  5. I completely agree. People should be able to read whatever they want to! Some of the things they have some of the books banned for doesn’t even make since. Like satanic on The Hunger Games. WHAT?? Generally, people who pick up a book to read will read what it is about and if it is about something they are not comfortable with, then put it down, we are forcing people to read something that is offensive to them. I read Lolita because it was banned and even though it is about a pedophile, it was still an incredibly good book. Nabokov’s writing style is wonderful. I know I won’t stop my kids from reading books they want to read. Thanks for the giveaway!

    Vyki @ On The Shelf

    Like this

  6. Great giveaway honey. The American Library Association’s banner for this one rocks, I’m liking it. :-) It’s crazy some of the books that make it onto these lists. I haven’t read E&P yet but it’s one my shelf waiting to be… I’m looking forward to it!

    Like this

  7. That is some list, thanks for the giveaway

    Lainy http://www.alwaysreading.net

    Like this

  1. Pingback: Confession: I’m a fanatical fan of authors | Jen's Pen Den

  2. Pingback: What My Mother Doesn’t Know Book Review | The Reading Date

  3. Pingback: Controversial Books: A Good Story is a Good Story - JeriWB

Speak To Me

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,586 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
http://thereadingdate.com/2013/09/23/banned-books-week-giveaway/
thereadingdate.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
113677
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2JUCLGCC22XXLCPO4JT245PKUVSXLNWP
<urn:uuid:77cab1e8-080f-42c3-ae12-21bfd30a9023>
2014-04-16T07:48:57Z
66.155.9.238
sha1:AP4PELHK7YNDTWMUQWA3BZQZSI2TPJVF
<urn:uuid:83dca740-3d92-44e1-84c2-fadd32d966f5>
http://thereadingdate.com/2013/09/23/banned-books-week-giveaway/
length
response
<urn:uuid:be69abdb-65d7-4955-8de2-c62d5a25a8fe>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf