Book #5 – The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Alright, so I missed the cut off by a couple days for Banned Book Week. You can blame my wedding anniversary. Now, onto the last Banned Book for a bit.

While the book was first published in 2003, the latest controversy was in 2015, at Reynolds High School, when a parent objected to the book for a couple of reasons. First, the parent didn’t like the language, adult themes, or how the book objectified women. (More on that later, because let’s just say “This book did not back down from being brutal.”) Second, and possibly stranger, the parent objected that the book was a replacement for All Quiet on the Western Front. Here’s where the first objection doesn’t make much sense, because from what I remember of All Quiet, it’s got plenty of adult themes because well, war. In any case, the school ruled to return to All Quiet and only read excerpts from Kite Runner.

The book, the first by Khaled Hosseini, tells the saga of Amir as he grows up in the wealthy part of Afghanistan, only to flee from the Russians. He then returns, nearly 2 decades later to right a wrong from his childhood. The tale mingles the history of the wars in Afghanistan, a tad of tradition and spirituality, and the story of one man discovering that there was more to his story than he ever thought possible.

Book #51 – Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

The summer reading list of Chesterfield Country, Virginia included 3 books that caused quite a stir with parents in 2016. One such book was Eleanor & Park, which was banned for being sexually explicit and containing “vile, vile, nasty language”. In fact, the state Senator even called for the librarians who had suggested the book to be fired. A committee was put together within the school board, PTA parents, and teachers read through the 3 books in full, and decided to keep the books on the list.

Eleanor & Park was originally published in 2013 and recounts the story of two teenagers slowly falling in love. The book also handles things like race, body image, bullying, domestic abuse, and whether Batman is a boring superhero. The book is set in the mid 1980s, in Omaha Nebraska and could honestly rival Romeo and Juliet for a teachable love story.

Book #565 – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Every year, the Toronto Public Library releases a report on the books that received censorship requests. In 2015, a patron requested that Dave Egger’s book be removed for “being poorly written and profane”. The book itself is a stream of consciousness that in many parts contains more profanity than the movie Wolf of Wall Street (which supposedly contains the most profanity per minute of any one film). The request is therefore valid, as the grammar is severely lacking compared to “normal” prose, and the profanity is pretty much constant. Toronto kept the book on its shelves, causing the patron to probably make the shaming fingers at it whenever they passed it on the memoir shelves.

The book follows Dave as he deals with the loss of both parents, the guardianship of his much younger brother, Toph, and has a start up magazine in San Francisco in the early 90s. The book reads like the verbatim transcription of someone walking around with a tape recorder plugged into the thought center of their brain. Actually, in several spots in the book, the tape recorder is mentioned, and Dave just lacks a filter between that thought center and his mouth.

Book #60 – Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

In 2016, Lemont High School published a school reading curriculum which had a couple of parents (and a silent back up of “parents and neighborhood”) up in arms over it’s “pornographic” content. The potential ban list was initially started by Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but quickly included 7 other books that contained any sort of sexual interaction, murder, suicide, or homoeroticism. The books were sustained and students were given the “opt out” option where they or their parents could request an alternative title. In a bizarre twist, the same high school put on the play production of Thirteen Reasons Why earlier the very same year.

Thirteen Reasons Why was originally published in October 2007, when I would have been starting my Senior year at high school. I, like many others, had not heard of the book until the controversial Netflix series aired. In a way, I’m glad I hadn’t discovered in high school, as suicide had blackened much of my own Junior year. It follows Clay, a Junior at Liberty High School, as he discovers a shoe box of cassette tapes been anonymously mailed to him. Listening to the tapes, he finds out it’s a recorded suicide note from Hannah, a girl who had died only a few weeks before. What follows is both a traumatic experience for Clay, and likely, many readers.

Book #131 – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Over the summer of 2015, Knoxville’s STEM program assigned this book to the incoming freshmen. One mother objected on the grounds of “pornographic” content, due to the description of how Henrietta discovered her cervical cancer, and the mentions of her husband’s sleeping around. The author weighed in on the challenge in a September 2015 statement that made national news. The last publish on it was that the school was investigating the challenge, but did allow their teachers some level of autonomy when selecting reading lists.

The book itself was published in 2010 and is a mixture of the author’s research into how HeLa cells were found and developed, and the story of Henrietta and her family. In a statement by the author, she had not originally intended to include the story of the Lacks’ family, but after speaking with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, the author knew she would have to include the family’s story. HeLa, a seemingly immortal strain of cancer cells, has been integral in cell research for decades, and this book details how it all started, and the consequences of that research.

Book #23 – The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

First up in the reading of Banned Books, is this coming-of-age novel from 1999, set in the early 1990s. It is like the updated version of Catcher in the Rye, and reads in a similar fashion to The Curious Incident, to be honest. It was challenged in 2016 when it was placed on the seventh grade advanced reading list at Pasco Middle School. The reason for the challenge was the depictions of sexual activity and drug use, but the book was maintained after many came protested, telling how they connected with the book. Like it’s predecessors, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, etc, the book basically gives a more raw look into teenage life, and that likely speaks to young teenagers trying to figure out what normal even means.

For me, the book felt a tad juvenile, but I’m almost 30, and I think I may be outside of the normal age-group for this book. As for the “graphic content” I’d rather read about a kid figure out sex, drugs, and music than some of the more bloody books they selected for my freshman reading.