Banned Books: Guess Which Book Topped the List Again

The American Library
Association is “celebrating” (their words, not mine) Banned Books
Week. For the second year in a row, the most frequently challenged
piece of literature in the Land of the Free is
Captain Underpants.

Why are so many crusaders trying to remove this work from
schools and libraries? The
three main reasons cited by those who challenge Captain
Underpants are its “offensive language,” “violence,” and
“unsuitable” content for its prepubescent target demographic.

However, author Dav Pilkey
points out that his “books contain no sex, no profanity, no
nudity, no drugs, and no graphic violence (at least nothing you
wouldn’t see in a 1950’s Superman comic book).
So what’s the big deal?” Pilkey puts in nicer words, but basically,
there’s a whole bunch of nanny-types out there who never bother
cracking his books open for themselves before deciding that an
eight-year-old giggling while reading is reason enough to go into
literary lockdown.

Much of the top 10 list contains such lightweight reading –
Fifty Shades of Grey, The Hunger Games,
Bone – that, as Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has
previously suggested, it’s such a
banal evil, it’s hard to be angry at. If America’s
politically-and-morally-correct Frankenstein monsters have
only enough synapses firing to challenge comic books and pop porno,
they’re presumably (hopefully) a coalition no longer literate
enough to take issue with Brave New World (previously
challenged for “insensitivity”) or To Kill a Mockingbird
(previously challenged for “racism”).

This isn’t to make light of
censorship. The Kid’s Right to Read Project, an arm of the National
Coalition Against Censorship, says that pro-censorship book
challenges rose a dramatic 53
percent in 2013. That organization believes that “each time a
book is a removed it reinforces the idea that books and ideas are
off-limits if someone doesn’t like them. It contributes to a
culture where it’s better to hide from controversial or difficult
topics, than to acknowledge or discuss them.”

Nor am I jabbing at the merits of Captain Underpants.
As Banned Books Week Chair Judith Platt
realizes, the book is “naughty and it’s seditious and it
certainly is irreverent and challenges authority.”

Pilkey agrees. He believes “it is important… to question
authority — because, you know, there are villains in real life, and
they don’t always wear black capes and black hats. Sometimes
they’re dressed like authority figures. And kids need to know that
it’s important to question them.”

Check out the rest of the challenged books list
here.