Great Banned Books

I’ve been using Wednesdays to post recommendations for books about non-traditional (or non-specific), but not necessarily LGBT families. Given that this is Banned Books Week, however, I thought I’d just offer a few more thoughts stemming from that event.

Here’s an interesting fact, for example: Nearly half (43) of the books on the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century list have been challenged or banned. It’s hard to say if more were challenged because they were well known and therefore threatening, or became well known through controversy. (I’ll observe, though, that the many LGBT-inclusive children’s books by small presses never seem to make the ALA’s Banned Books lists, probably because they don’t get distributed widely in the first place.)

Given that the Harry Potter tops the list of the most challenged books between 2000 and 2007, it’s not surprising to see that The Lord of the Rings is one of the banned books on the Radcliffe list. I laughed at this for several reasons, not least of which is that I started reading The Hobbit to my five-year-old son yesterday. (I know, technically, it’s a prequel, and not part of the core LOTR series.) It’s not the kind of book he’s going to read himself for many years, but he saw the new LEGO Castle Dwarves’ Mine at the mall the other day, and was asking about dwarves and such. Being the geek and ex-medievalist that I am, I decided a little Tolkien wouldn’t be a bad thing. The Hobbit is a much lighter story than the main LOTR tale, anyway. I’m abridging a little, not for appropriateness as much as length. Some of the characters’ epic elocutions are hard for even older readers to follow, and the last thing I want is for my son to decide that Tolkien is boring.

I’m not expecting deep comprehension at this point, and I know he’s just as likely to want something by Mo Willems for bedtime. I’m excited, though, about sharing my love of books, banned and otherwise, and happy that opportunities to do so are growing.

What are the books for older readers you are most looking forward to sharing with your young children when they are old enough?