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{ Thursday, September 25, 2003 }

9:35 PM | link

A few of us BookCrossers in Austin are adopting a classroom in East Austin and keep a bookshelf stocked with books. We'll actually be adopting two classrooms -- one 2nd grade and one 5th grade so we have somewhere to put books of varying reading levels. We're doing the 2nd grade classroom first, which we'll stock with picture books mostly, but we'll take any kids' books we can!

If you're interested in donating some books to the cause, please let me know! As for logistics, you could bring the books you want to donate to the next Austin BookCrossing Meetup.

3:00 PM | link

For those of you who don't know, this is Banned Books Week, a project put together by the American Library Association to celebrate the freedom to read. (An important thing to encourage and celebrate in this land and time of the Patriot Act.)

I celebrated Banned Books Week by leaving 19 commonly challenged books in Austin City Hall this weekend. I used BookCrossing to tag all the books, and a woman picked up Brave New World and wrote in her journal entry that she was going to share it with your 16-yr-old daughter and they'd talk about it afterwards. Score.

So when on Monday I saw a teaser on the local FOX station for a story on that evening's news about how a parent successfully removed a book from a middle school library, you can imagine my reaction.

Here's the situation: A 12-yr-old girl checked out a book called Crazy by Benjamin Lebert from her middle school library in Round Rock ISD. Crazy is a coming-of-age book about a troubled teenager, and it was written by a German 16-yr-old, then translated into English.

It has a sex scene in it, which is what the mother was upset about, calling the book "pornographic". (FOX then proceeded to give the "definition" of pornography, which I found ever so helpful.)

The mother was able to get the book removed from the middle school's library shelves and removed from another junior high in the district, but the district did not remove it from all the high school libraries, though that's what the mother wanted. (However, they did tell her if she wanted to file a formal complaint, a committee would be established to review the book, so I doubt they refused to remove it from all schools out of much conviction for keeping the book on the shelves.)

Personally, I agree that 12 might be a little too young to be reading about sexual encounters, but that's really for parents to decide. Some 12-yr-olds are more than mature enough to read about such things. And if reading about sex encourages your child to ask you questions, all the better. Communication about sex is good. Pretending it doesn't exist only leads to trouble. Though most parents might not want to think their sweet little 12-yr-old will have to deal with sex for a while yet, they're most likely sadly mistaken.

And on top of it all, when I was calling around town to find a copy of Crazy for myself, the good folks at BookPeople tipped me off to another attempt to ban books this week at a school in the South Texas ISD. This time, the books were Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land. As the associate director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, Beverley Becker, put it:
It is not only the right of parents, but their responsibility to be involved in what their kids are reading. But there’s a line that they cross when they ask that in addition to their kid, that nobody else have access to that book. When they go that next step that nobody else can have access, that’s when we come to a problem.
Thankfully, the board decided to keep the books in the curriculum. I especially liked the comments from one student who spoke up to the board:
Based on the objections to the two books, [Ben Salinas, a junior at the Academy,] proposed a list created with the help of his fellow students of more than 30 other books that should be banned, including many of Shakespeare’s works. "Romeo and Juliet. It’s sexually explicit, with a double suicide where the main characters kill themselves," he said while many of his supporters in the audience tittered. "People who censor directly block out society. Do we, South Texas ISD, the best school in Texas, want to be known as a district that prevents our students from learning about the world that surrounds them? I hope not."
Coincidentally, I did submit an incident report about Crazy to the ALA, which tracks ban/challenge incidents in order to create their 100 most challenged lists. If you ever hear of a ban/challenge yourself, be sure to fill out their online form. It doesn't take very long and it helps provide us all with a more realistic picture of how books are challenged and banned in society today.

{ Sunday, September 21, 2003 }

6:27 PM | link

We were driving north on Mopac tonight when we passed a beat-up red pick-up truck pulling a little trailer behind it. Tied to the hood of the truck was a 3-foot-long plastic alligator with a Barbie riding the alligator. I love Austin.

{ Monday, September 08, 2003 }

9:38 PM | link

Naya found a wonderful home, but now cute little Chimi needs a home!

Speaking of cute, I just finished reading a cute book by Carl Hiaasen -- Hoot. It's his first children's book, and I loved it! If you have kids or friends with kids or kids in your family, buy them this book!

And if you get a chance to watch Lovely & Amazing, do it! I was pleasantly surprised.

Whoa. That was way too many exclamation points. Let me round it out a bit. Yay. Woohoo. Hooray. There. All better.

{ Wednesday, September 03, 2003 }

9:53 PM | link

Tonight I went to a talk titled "United States of Amnesia: How the Media Construct Memory and History" by David Barsamian, whom I had never heard of before. I'm so glad I got off my ass and went.

Barsamian writes various articles for The Progressive magazine and does a lot of interviews for Alternative Radio. By the way, if a radio station in your area plays any Alternative Radio programs, check them out. No radio station in Austin plays their programs regularly, so you better damn well take advantage of it if one of your local stations does. And I expect full reports on what I'm missing out on!

{ Tuesday, September 02, 2003 }

8:39 PM | link

I finally watched Secretary last night. Every time we went to Encore, it was always checked out. But not this time!

Very interesting movie. A little bit disturbing, even. But in a good way.