4 posts tagged “books”

Because you're never too old to rejoice in the receiving of gifts.  Here's what I picked up (in the realm of media; I also got clothes, shoes, food, etc.) over the last couple of days.  Items with an asterisk are actually Keri's, but we tend to pool our resources when it comes to media.

Books

DVDs

Why do book cover blurbs always have so many spoilers, especially non-ending spoilers?  I know the publishers are only concerned with the book to sell it, but it's annoying when details that are supposed to be revealed over the course of the book are spelled out on the book jacket (which, when you're exploring a library or bookstore rather than getting recommendations elsewhere, is a must-read).  I'm currently reading Orphans of Chaos, and the orphans' Talents are to some extent listed on the book jacket, even though they've only been hinted at in the first 100 pages.  TV previews and movie trailers are rarely so blatant.

On the other hand, the blurbs are often wrong, so I guess they're not that spoily.

I'm working on putting all the books, DVDs and music I own into a "personal library" collection here on Vox.  (I really wish they would add other Amazon items, particularly video games, this way.)

Note:  the fact that something's in this collection doesn't mean that I've finished reading/viewing it, or that other readers have - so use spoiler warnings where necessary in the comments!

If you haven't already heard, we're in the middle of Banned Book Week.  There's a lot of good discussions going on about censorship, like this one over at Pandagon.  There's a neat chart (in PDF form) on the Illinois Library Association website as well, detailing the challenges over the past year.  Sadly, I haven't read many of the books on this list - just The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I've been meaning to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower but haven't gotten around to it yet.  [Edit:  another list can be found here, via UC San Diego.]

My own experience with censorship in schools is rather limited.  I had a lot of freedom to choose my reading material at all levels - which is where my love of science fiction comes from, I think.  In preparation for third grade, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle In Time; by fifth grade, our advanced reading group had blown through the school's reading textbooks and class sets and got to choose our own material - we binged on H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  In high school, we still needed approval for our choice of books to present on, but I don't think anything was turned down except maybe Sweet Valley High books.

There were only two incidents of censorship that I was aware of.  (There may have been more, but they were handled on a level that was out of my sight.)  The first was in third grade, where the class copies of a Roald Dahl anthology had one of the stories ("The Swan," I believe) cut out of them - I think the idea was that it was too violent for our little eight-year-old minds.  The second was in middle school, when we read Fahrenheit 451.  Our English teacher (who was actually a pretty good teacher, albeit one with an underdeveloped sense of irony) had instructed prior classes to go through all the class copies and redact the naughty (PG-13, tops) language, because of her opinion that no book really needs to use curse words to make their point.  (I've heard a couple local urban legends about it - that a later student whose parent worked for the ACLU sued the school, and that Ray Bradbury himself petitioned to have the censored copies removed, but a more factual account from the local paper is here.)

Kudos to the librarians for keeping the issue in the collective consciousness, and for fighting the good fight.  Not only are they the secret masters of information who control the universe, but they're very cool and make kickass action heroes, too.