You Can’t Read That!

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.

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From the Underground New York Public Library Tumblr (photo by Ourit Ben-Haim)

YCRT! News Roundup

With Harper Lee’s re-emergence on the literary scene, people are once again talking about her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Predictably, some of those people think the book, and at least one high school production of a play based on the book, should be suppressed.

Here’s some news about a failed effort to ban disturbing posters of clowns. While I’m totally opposed to banning books, I fully endorse the banning of clowns.

Administrators force a public school library to pull copies of a graphic novel from its shelves after a single verbal complaint from a parent, short-circuiting their own formal review process.

Public library in Texas stands up to conservative parents who wanted two LGBT-themed books removed from its children’s collection.

I didn’t know that Ray Bradbury’s publisher, Ballentine Books, for years only sold a bowdlerized version of Fahrenheit 451. Apparantly Bradbury didn’t know either, and was furious when he found out.

Disturbing if true: “In just four years, the percentage of Americans who believe there are any books that should be banned has increased by more than half: 28% believe this to be the case today, vs. 18% in 2011.”

The mayor of Venice, Italy, has officially banned school books addressing homosexuality and disability.

The Fivethirtyeight blog questions the statistical validity of the American Library Association’s list of most-banned books, complaining that the ALA won’t share its data. Here is ALA’s response.

Trigger warnings: Judy Blume laments that many on the left are now pushing censorship with the same zeal as the 1980s religious right.

Columbia University agrees with Ms Blume: it will combat censorship by not requiring professors to issue trigger warnings about class materials. It did, however, remove Ovid’s Metamorphoses from one class reading list, a book that triggered sensitive fee-fees in some students.

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