So I'm still reading the Girls Gone Mild book. The author has ventured into dangerous territory with me and my chosen career as a librarian. As a librarian, banning books, any books, is a bad idea. Maybe it's some sort of fear of a totalitarian state or references my second favorite line from the film JFK, "Fascism is coming back!"

At any rate, I've always been angry at parents who try to shield everyone from something that goes against a person's or group's beliefs, be they concerned with sexuality, politics, religion, you name it. I had never however, considered students not wanting to read a book because of their own moral beliefs. Notice I didn't say ban...the books that were mentioned were not banned outright from the schools in which they were part of the curriculum. What amazed me about one story related in the book was of a Freshman English class spending time reading a book out loud during class time. Not excerpts, but the whole book. I never had a class like that. Well, maybe in elementary school when we spent 30 minutes a day reading Anne of Green Gables out loud. (I still wonder about the two boys in a class of 15 girls and how their interests were being met by reading Anne of Green Gables.) If I had been put into a situation reading an embarrassing book infront of my entire English class I would have probably been uncomfortable with a lot more things growing up. Books I read in my Freshman English class included Hiroshima, Lord of the Flies, Romeo & Juliet, The Odyssey, Hard Times (ugh) and I want to say I read Alas Babylon as an alternative book. I can think of a few passages that would probably have been a little awkward in each of these. However, we never read an entire book out loud in class. Does this indicate that children are reading less for homework and eschewing true learning for extracurricular activities? I hope not, because that would seem to me like a bigger problem.

I'm all for people standing up for what they believe in and if they don't want to read a certain book out loud or to themselves that offends them, they shouldn't have to read it. (This is why I decided not to finish Palahniuk's Haunted... It didn't get me anywhere, didn't make me a better person and taught me nothing.) People feel the same way about certain tv shows, music or magazines. If people don't like violence and gore, they probably won't watch CSI or think that they're children should play certain video games. If someone is offended by certain types of music they probably won't listen to it. That's all fine and dandy. It's when they start wanting to keep everyone from deciding what they enjoy or enjoying what they decide is good that it starts making me a little angry.