Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Banned Books Challenge 2016: Review Link-Up


For full information about this challenge and to sign-up, please see this post first.

Use this page to link-up your reviews for the 2016 Banned Books Challenge so that we can read them! Feel free to link to wherever you post reviews -- your blog, GoodReads, Amazon, B&N, etc., etc. Reviews are optional.

Please make sure to use the direct URL to your individual post/review, NOT the book's information page, your blog's homepage, or a profile page. If you do not write reviews, you can leave a comment telling us which books you've read.

If you choose to write a wrap-up post (whether or not you also link up reviews), you can link that here as well. The review linky will remain open for reviews and wrap-ups until January 31, 2017.

Note: Please only link up reviews for books read/reviewed in 2016 -- if you have an older review of a banned book you've read previously and would like to share with the group, please tell us about it in the comments instead.

To make it easier to find your reviews, please include the name of the book in addition to your blog name. For Example:

The Great Gatsby @Buckling Bookshelves
Perks of Being a Wallflower @Your Blog Name Here

2 comments:

  1. any thoughts on censored books? I reviewed a book by Agatha Christie where anti-Semitism was present in the original edition and subsequently removed. (I read the modern edition)

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    1. The intersection of censorship and discrimination is definitely an interesting one. I don't think it is necessarily beneficial to erase the fact that problematic views about various groups were so commonplace in years past. But we also don't want to advance or condone them. While I like to think things have improved, discrimination and prejudice of all kinds still exist. The racism, sexism, antisemitism, able-ism, etc. that we (hopefully) recognize in older books as wrong probably didn't raise many eyebrows when they were written. I think leaving in that sort of stuff can be a teaching tool, but I don't think creating a modernized edition is automatically a bad idea either. (How's that for an answer!)

      Interesting that you brought this up now though because I've been on the fence about adding the Little House books to our collection. They are such beloved classics, but I've also heard concerns about the "casual" racism present in them. And I don't say that to mean that it is unimportant or should be excused, but rather that certain words, descriptions, etc. were just commonplace back then. A conundrum for sure!

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I'd love to hear what you think :)