QUOTE
'The American banned list reveals a society with seious hang-ups'
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Next week is Banned Books Week in the US, when the American Library Association lists all the books that, over the previous year, people have attempted to remove from the shelves of libraries, schools and universities. This makes for sobering reading: the top ten most opposed authors in the US include J. K.Rowling (for promoting witchcraft), John Steinbeck (bad language), Maya Angelou (for sexual explicitness) and Stephen King (for being scary). In the list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the past decade, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn comes in at No 5 (use of the word “nigger”), J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye at 13 (profanity, sexual references) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple at No 18 (inappropriate language, sex). Astonishingly, Brett Easton Ellis’s serial-killing saga American Psycho (a book that possibly merits banning for adjective abuse) comes romping in at No 60.
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Next week is Banned Books Week in the US, when the American Library Association lists all the books that, over the previous year, people have attempted to remove from the shelves of libraries, schools and universities. This makes for sobering reading: the top ten most opposed authors in the US include J. K.Rowling (for promoting witchcraft), John Steinbeck (bad language), Maya Angelou (for sexual explicitness) and Stephen King (for being scary). In the list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the past decade, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn comes in at No 5 (use of the word “nigger”), J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye at 13 (profanity, sexual references) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple at No 18 (inappropriate language, sex). Astonishingly, Brett Easton Ellis’s serial-killing saga American Psycho (a book that possibly merits banning for adjective abuse) comes romping in at No 60.