Introducing the Banned Books Reading Challenge!

Censorship. A nasty word, a horrible concept, and yet it never goes away, does it? Especially in adolescent literature, authors who dare to write about serious or controversial topics are often slammed, shunned, and criticized. Earlier this month a teen lit festival in Texas disinvited bestselling YA author Ellen Hopkins because a handful of adults felt that she and her books are not appropriate literature for children. Last year I talked about an English teacher who got under fire because she used YA books as supplementary texts beside the regular English curriculum. Censorship, censorship, it comes and it goes, but it's always there.

Banned Books Week 2010 is coming up soon, between September 25 and October 2. However, we bloggers, lovers, readers, writers, and supporters of YA lit are going to make this bigger and better. Donna at Bites has put together a Ban This! celebration for the months of September and October, encouraging bloggers to link to their reviews of banned or challenged books, or otherwise feature them in some way or another on your blogs.

I come to you with another proposal: a community Banned Books Reading Challenge. I've contacted Donna and several bloggers who've done personal challenges of this sort and have their support for hosting this challenge. Please read on and consider participating if you want to help support freedom of information in YA literature and fight censorship!

From http://litbites.blogspot.com.

The Banned Books Reading Challenge 2010

Goals of This Challenge:

• To bring attention to books that have been challenged or banned
• To support authors whose freedom of expression have been questioned or challenged by buying and reading their books
• To increase awareness of censorship

The best way to fight censorship is to do what these challengers rarely do, and that is to READ the books that have been challenged and educate ourselves on their content and impact on our society!

Guidelines:

• The challenge will run from September 1, 2010 to October 15, 2010.
• The challenge is open to any reader with an online blogging platform who'd like to participate.
• I personally will devote my attention towards mostly YA literature challenged within the last decade, but you are welcome to any books of your choosing, from challenged picture books (there are a lot of them) to frequently banned classics.
• I will make it my goal to read at least 7 challenged or banned books (one for each day of Banned Books Week), but you are welcome to read less or more.

Signup:

1. You must create a main post on your own blog where you state your intention to take part in this challenge, a tentative goal, and link back to this post. This main post will be where you link to your reviews of the banned or challenged books you've read, or to otherwise talk about issues revolving around book challenges, censorship, and more.
2. I highly encourage you to visit one another's blogs and to support one another via comments and spreading the word. The more people we can get to read challenged and banned books, the more we are learning and the more we are proving to the handful of adults who feel like they have the right to say what kids and teens can or can't read that they do not have the power to hold us down!

Resources:

• The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Challenged Children's Book List. This list is divided up into age group, which is definitely convenient.
• 10 Frequently Challenged Books Everyone Should Read at Paste Magazine
• Hit List for Young Adults 2 by Teri Lesesne and Rosemary Chance. Written for librarians combating censorship but provides a list of 20 titles that may or may not interest you.
• The left-hand sidebar of the ALA Frequently Challenged Books site features many ways in which challenged books are broken down by year, decade, type of challenge, etc. Very fascinating to look at.
• The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has a great website dedicated to Banned Books Week, the freedom to read, and reviews of banned books.
• The Illinois Library Association issues a fantastic bibliography every year noting the books challenged that year. This could help you a lot with more recently challenged books. 
• The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has compiled a shocking list of challenges made in the state.

As this is the first time I'm hosting a challenge, please bear with me if things do not go as smoothly as we'd like. If you have any questions or suggestions, or if you'd like to contributed to the Banned Books Reading Challenge via a guest post, button, or giveaway, please email me at stephxsu at gmail dot com. I'll be happy to hear from you!

Sign up below. Please use the format

Your name: Name/Alias (Blog Name in parentheses)

Your URL: the URL of your sign-up post!

Good luck and have fun! :)



[ETA 9/7/10] Due to a lack of knowledge on my part, I have unfortunately negated the code for the first sign-up Mr. Linky. :( You can click above to see those of you who've already signed up. For anyone who wants to continue signing up, please use the widget below, following the same format. This does not meet that you have to sign up again if you already did so! Your link is still above, if you click forward to another page. Sorry about this! I now know better for next time. :(