Kicking off Banned Books Week with a Saturdays @ the South Primer

While more features and posts are still in the works (I promise!) I've got another Saturdays @ the South post raring to go: http://www.peabodylibrary.org/freeforall/?p=1895

I'm particularly proud of this one, largely because it made me touch nervous and I posted it anyway. I've gotten some good feedback from colleagues (thank you!) about the content, which is always satisfying. However, considering this post is for a public institution, bringing in materials that aren't really controversial to libraries (or shouldn't be, anyway) but could be touchy with the reading public I was still a little antsy. But I got to post a Neil Gaiman video that turns me into a puddle of mush with admiration so that makes up for a lot.

The whole point of this post is that people shouldn't be antsy about books that push people's buttons, that having discussions about what we don't like about books is not only healthy, but also an important part of free speech. Taking away books not only takes away people rights, but takes away people's opportunity to complain. I find it difficult to believe that people want to give that up, but we all know it happens just the same.  My personal favorite in doing the research for this post was finding out that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was challenged because someone thought the anatomical descriptions were pornographic. Good grief.

One note I do want to add, because I'm not sure it was obvious from the post (even though I did link back to the site where I got the images) was that those amazing paintings of character mug shots were from a Flavorwire article that had more great images and some good things to say against banning books. Book challengers are the original versions of internet trolls and like all trolls, we just need to turn their words against them to shut them down. Even though we should always be speaking out in favor of books and ideas, let's all speak that much louder in favor of books this week, even the ones we don't agree with or like, because in doing so, it keeps the conversation going and protects everyone's rights to read whatever they want.