Thanks to Jason Boog at GalleyCat for alerting me to this article from the American Library Association which, among other things, lists the top ten 'challenged' (aka 'banned') books of 2012. Here they are: • Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey • “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie • “Thirteen Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher • “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James • “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell • “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini • “Looking for Alaska,” by John Green • Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz • “The Glass Castle,” by Jeannette Walls • “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison By far the most popular listed reason for the...

  The image above (also linked to here) has been making the social media rounds lately. Not much to say about it other than "I agree." It reminds me of a documentary the Beloved and I have been watching on Netflix this week about a man who left the Neo-Nazi community and is trying to start his life over again. One of the things that disillusioned him about that community was the hypocrisy—the leaders would preach that they were doing whatever they did "for the children," but the rate of domestic violence in that community was staggeringly high. What this picture is...

I’ve been mostly away from my computer for the last few days, due to an early Thanksgiving visit with family. But I’ve been following the news while I’ve been gone, and there have been a few interesting items concerning Amazon. One is that, in the UK, Philip Jones reports that Amazon had to answer to Parliament last week concerning its habit of basing its UK business in Luxembourg where it can fulfill orders without having to charge the sizable UK value-added tax (or what we in the US call sales tax) on it orders. Jones notes that there seemed to be...

If you've never read a book specifically in celebration of Banned Books Week, you might want to consider rectifying that situation this Sunday, September 30, when the 30th anniversary of the proud literary tradition officially kicks off. I can still remember (more or less) when I first learned about Banned Books Week: I was probably 11 or 12—Isaac Asimov and the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature were my big obsessions at the time. A Banned Books Week poster was hanging on the wall outside my elementary school's library, and next to it was a glass case with shelves inside, and stacked on the...