Read Across America
Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss! Today is also #ReadAcrossAmerica Day! Read, learn, live!
Literacy
Happy Birthday, Lemony Snicket
Happy birthday to the author of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, a book which has faced censorship. In 2001, a group of elementary teachers lobbied to have their school cancel an appearance by Handler on account of a “suggestion of incest in one of the books and Count Olaf’s […]
Celebrating the freedom of choice
Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me. -Judy Blume
Banned Books Awareness: “Banned Books saved from burning in Canada”
Just two days before Deborah Merrick, Branch Manager at Merritt Library in British Columbia, was scheduled to burn banned books, members of the community came forward to stop her. “People came in and said they didn’t want any books burned,” Merrick said. “I didn’t have a single person come out […]
Banned Books Awareness: “Literacy is a Lifestyle”
March is National Reading and Grammar Month here in the United States. It is built around the birthday of Dr. Seuss, as March 2 is honored with a National Read Across America Day. Libraries and schools from coast to coast held reading parties and celebrated the written word; but for […]
Banned Books Awareness: Revising history
Most people are familiar with the classic saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” uttered by George Santayana. He, himself, identified as an American and wrote exclusively in English, but the famous philosopher was born in Madrid and was a lifelong Spanish citizen even though […]
Banned Books Awareness: Retrospective on a year’s worth of censorship
Many New Years resolutions concern ways of improving the self- smoke less, exercise more; spend less, conserve more. These are worthy goals, but always subjective in nature and often fall to the wayside as circumstances and attitudes change while the year takes shape. As long-time readers of this column are […]
Banned Books Awareness: “The Canterbury Tales”
Translating poetry from one language to another is tricky and often unsuccessful, as some things rarely convert correctly from one set of colloquialisms to the next. Translating Chaucer from Middle English, for example, is no easy task because English has changed considerably in the last 600 years or so, to […]
Banned Books Awareness: Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s distinctive writing style influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and his public image. Hemingway wrote seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works between the 1920’s and the 1950’s, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954; three non-fiction works were also […]
Introducing the Banned Books Awareness and Reading for Knowledge project
Back in October, 2010 I heard about Banned Book week. This is a project spearheaded by the American Library Association as “an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment”. Held during the last week of September, Banned Book Week highlights the benefits of free and open […]