Finding Freedom in Reading with Banned Books Week

This Sunday marked the beginning of “Banned Books Week,” which aims to raise awareness of freedom of speech through celebrating challenged books.

Banned Books Week was started by the American Library Association in 1982. According to ACLU Oregon, a book is “challenged” when a person or group objects to the materials and attempts to remove or restrict a book’s accessibility. The book is “banned” when the removal is successful. Since the launch of Banned Books Week, more than 11,000 books have been challenged.

According to the American Library Association, over the past decade, the most banned and challenged books included literary classics like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” along with a number of contemporary works: Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games,” John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” and Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” to name a few.

The mission of this year’s campaign is to spotlight current and historical attempts to censor books in libraries and schools with the theme “Censorship is a Dead End. Find Your Freedom to Read.”

Each day of the week has its own individual theme: reading a banned book, speaking out about censorship, creating something unrestricted, expressing the freedom to read in style, writing about your rights, learning from others, and thanking those who defend the freedom to read every day of the year.

Buzzy Nielsen, the State Library of Oregon’s program manager, library support and development services, told the Oregonian that Banned Books Week is an opportunity for libraries to highlight the diversity of the materials they carry.

“There’s something in the library to offend everybody,” he said.

There were 18 challenged books in Oregon this year, including:

“The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer,” by Gary Paulsen