Books Banned Somewhere in the World Range from The Holy Bible to Harry Potter and Charlotte's Web
Numerous persons from the campus and community interested in freedom with regard to literature read from favorite censored books Wednesday (Sept. 27) as Wilmington College held its annual Banned Books Read-In at Watson Library.
The library and the English Dept. sponsored the annual event as part of the National Library Association's 36th-anniversary observance of “Banned Books Week.”
PICTURED: Christopher Collins, assistant professor of English and director of The Writing Center, reads the poem, "Song of Myself," from Walt Whitman's classic collection, Leaves of Grass.
The event is designed to raise awareness of the need to be ever vigilant about the potential for reading censorship by government and other entities in American society — and to bring to light how this freedom often has not been guaranteed around the world.
Books ranging from the Holy Bible to Harry Potter to Charlotte's Web and To Kill a Mockingbird have been censored, suppressed, hidden, given limited access and outright banned someplace in the world at some time. The United States is not immune from this type of censorship.
In recent years, excerpts were read from such famous banned books as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn, in addition to The Day No Pigs Would Die, Decameron, Our Bodies – Ourselves, A Wrinkle in Time, the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Some of the books featured in this year’s read-in were And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and “Song of Myself,” a poem from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection.
New this year, the read-in also included an interactive role-playing game in which a mock school board meeting was held on whether to remove Jay Asher’s book, Thirteen Reasons Why, a young adult novel dealing with bullying and suicide, from the school library.
