Banned Books Week 2021
Banned Books Week is an annual celebration of the freedom to read, sponsored by a coalition of groups including the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, PEN America, and Project Censored.
Although it is a more US-based event – in Canada we celebrate Freedom to Read Week in February as our week focussed on the ideals of intellectual freedom – we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library are nonetheless happy to signal boost and use this week as another opportunity to shout out some items bookish and book-adjacent.
Cover of George by Alex Gino.
First, a huge shout out to Alex Gino and their book George, which has the unfortunate distinction of being the most challenged or banned book in the United States for three years running. More importantly, though, it is a great book and well worth the read, regardless and also in spite of the controversy that has followed it.
You can learn more about the book and its author in this article by Beth Greenfield at Yahoo News.
The cover for Essex County by Jeff Lemire.
Second, we knew we had to share this book, and a picture of its cover, for Banned Books Week. This copy of Essex County by Jeff Lemire was originally acquired from an Edmonton Public Library book sale for the sole reason of it boasting a sticker announcing that the book had once been banned. This is a real-world example of something known as the Streisand Effect, where “an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information.” So thank you to Kyle at the EPL, as well as the original complainant, for Streisand-ing this copy of this book!
As a bonus, turns out this too is an amazing graphic novel, recommended to us by many and is, as our Butterfly-in-Chief says, “beautifully written, bittersweet, a tribute to the circle of life with Canadiana.”
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And as one last thing to share, there has been a poster that has been a feature of Butterflies & Aliens North since long before it became known as Butterflies & Aliens North, wrinkled and damaged by years of display, including an unfortunate incident involving tripping while carrying hot coffee. But it continues to adorn our walls as a reminder of this hot topic.
A marketing piece for the Globe and Mail newspaper and its weekly bestsellers list, this poster is titled “Hot Books: A Collection of Bestsellers That Have Been Banned or Burned Throughout History.” It was released in the wake of the so-called Rushdie Affair and so includes as its last panel an image of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses still aflame.
The Globe and Mail “Hot Books” poster, whose listed books include:
Homer’s The Odyssey
Confucius’ Analects
The Bible
Dante’s La Divina Commedia
The Works of Martin Luthor
Galileo’s Dialogosaprai due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo
Shakespeare’s Tragedie of King Richard the Second
Descartes’ Meditations Metaphisiques
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophique sure les Anglais
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Oscar Wilde’s Salome
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
The image of a burning book remains a powerful one, one that our Head Alien plays with very deliberately in their altered book project titled Spark Unnecessary, and which is used to great effect in this poster.
So with that image in mind, and as you perhaps ponder questions of intellectual freedom and access to books, and the very current issue of access to good information, we want to leave you with this quote from one of the authors included in the “Hot Books” poster:
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. – Oscar Wilde
Happy reading, and with gratitude that we can…
– Stacey and Winston
Find copies of these books at your local Canadian indie bookseller!
