Burning Harry Potter

I never much cared for Ryder Strong, the kid who played Sean on "Boy Meets World." My childhood best friend, however, thought he was awesome. I dunno...his "cuteness" just never registered for me. In any event, he's on television right now in some movie that's on Court TV. I should be doing work, all kinds of work...lesson planning, assignment creating, syllabus making, blah blah blah. But right now, I'd just rather not. I'd rather sit here at the computer in the pretense of doing actual work, and instead just look up things as they come to mind, like for instance, the ALA 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books list. Now, according to the ALA website, books get challenged with the "best intentions, to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information." That's interesting.

I wonder what difficult ideas and information prompted the challenging of The Outsiders (#43) and The Pigman (#44), two books that I will be teaching this semester. I'll bet that, in the case of The Outsiders, it had something to do with the fact that there are no adults in the book and the boys are all taking care of one another...maybe "gang mentality" or "latent homosexual innuendoes," or something to that effect. And as for The Pigman, the challenge likely involved something about "pedophilia," because the two main characters are teenagers and they befriend an elderly man.

Those two novels are higher up on the list than Fade (#65), which I wish I could teach. This whole banning books thing is really very arbitrary when you think about it...you could find something to "challenge" in any book, if you wanted to bad enough. What's so crazy about this, is that people want to do that. Robert Cormier said, "Political correctness is one of the worst things to happen to literature. It's killing language and thought. It's evading real life. It's substituting euphemisms for truth." He's currently at #3 on the list of 10 Most Challenged Authors from 1990-Present. He's been dead for four years, and his work is still being challenged. He wrote Fade.

In some places, they're still burning Harry Potter.

The whole thing is crazy. I wonder what Ryder Strong would think...

Interesting note: during the spellcheck of this post, I was notified that I had misspelled "semester." I had typed "semetser." The spellcheck's only suggestion for replacement? Snatcher. That's good stuff.