Banned Books and Mind Melt


Today in literary history: 1960, D. H. Lawrence is found "not guilty" in the obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover. Which is interesting because I started reading Catcher in the Rye today with my students and we were talking about banned books and the reasons books like Catcher were banned. For those of you who don't already know, I teach in a juvenile lockup where profanity is used as every part of speech when constructing a sentence so of course my kids were outraged that words like hell and goddamn would get a book banned. Now I'm not even sure what a book would have to do to get banned considering our tolerances are now far greater than they were in Salinger's day.

The other day I mentioned Mark Danielewski, author of House of Leaves. Today Jason Sheehan of NPR talks about his mind blowing follow up to One Rainy Day in May (The Familiar #1), Into the Forest (The Familiar #2)  which is now being added to my must read list.

Being that it's Monday and my students are already riled up, that's all for today. I'm off to try to meet my word count goal for the day!
xoxo
Kate

Comments

Popular Posts