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Banned books on display in the library. Photo by Renee Williamson.

FHS library pushes boundries by promoting banned books

Banned book week encourages freedom of speech by encouraging students to read and appreciate banned books.

By RENEE WILLIAMSON
fhspress.com Staff
Posted October 10, 2016

Books from every point of time have allowed readers to travel to a different time, but in the last thirty years books have become under attack. In today's school’s libraries and public libraries have had to hear the harsh words of parents, school faculty, and even district offices who have found a book in the said library that they deemed inappropriate for the children, or young adult in the facility.

Classic stories such as Gone With The Wind, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even The Great Gaspy are deemed banned by some people of society. Banned book week is a week to celebrate the banned books and our right as American citizens to have freedom to read whatever we like.

“This year’s theme is 'Stand up for your rights to read,'” said Joanne Ligamari, our school's teacher librarian.

At the library in the next two weeks, she is having an open display off all the banned or challenged books in our society that is available in our library. Students are able to check out the books and have a chance to get their “mug shot” taken with the criminal book. On each book there is a description on why it was banded or challenged and who had done the deed.

Ligamari is gearing up for the full patriotic stand against the criminalization of the very kid's books you might have read when you were in first grade. The same books that you enjoyed in younger years, such as When the Sidewalk Ends, is under the same hate list as Nazi Germany’s leader, Hitler’s Mein Kempf. Just because When the Sidewalk Ends, according to the reasons why it was banned, is a hated book by some parents due to it “promoting children to break dishes instead of drying them."

”Many countries in the world do not have the same freedom to read as we do, so stop by the library, pick up a banned and challenged book and exercise your literacy rights,” stated Ligamari.

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