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