The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Banned Books Week: America’s Top Ten Countdown

Hey, it’s Banned Books Week! The news is out now from ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom– the top ten banned and challenged titles for the year! And we’re counting them down here, just like Casey Kasem!

Thank you, Casey Kasem, for counting them down with us!

At number 10, Beloved by Toni Morrison took the place of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Both titles are often challenged, and have appeared on and off the top ten list over the last several years.

At number 9, newcomer The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls took the place of The Gossip Girls series by Cecily von Ziegesar, a series that has been in and out of the top 10 over the last ten years.

At number 8, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a favorite here that’s no stranger to challenges (last seen on the top ten list in 2008), jumped back into the top ten, displacing What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones, which also made the top ten in 2010 and 2011.

At number 7, newcomer Looking for Alaska by John Green displaced Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World had been in the top ten since 2010.

At number 6, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which also made the list in 2008, took the place of the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, which has made the list three times in the past ten years.

At number 5, the heartwarming story of a penguin family, And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, moved The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie… but we haven’t seen the end of that, so stay with me! As a side note, And Tango Makes Three has been number one four times and number 2 once in the past ten years already. Those penguins are alarming folk, apparently.

At number 4, the controversial erotica title Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, overshadowed My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy by Dori Hillestand Butler.

At number 3, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher displaced… The Hunger Games trilogy. Yes, really. With all the media attention directed to The Hunger Games, I’m kind of surprised those books didn’t make the top ten.

At number 2, guess what shows up? The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie actually moved UP the list, displacing The Color of Earth, a Korean manga series, entirely.

And… the number one banned or challenged book in the United States this past year is….. drumroll, please….

CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!

Now, I’m not a fan of potty humor, but really? What does this say about us as a society that the books most objected to in the country are challenged because of poop jokes? Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series knocked the series ttyn; ttyl; l8r, g8r by Lauren Myracle out of first place. Both series have had frequent appearances, in the top ten, though. That means her books will probably be back.

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to have a list like this every year? It’s great to hear how we should all promote literacy and do our best to put books into kids’ hands, to give them ownership. But look at the books in our top ten countdown here. Every one of them is a book a teen or child might read. Some might only read them in school, but some of them are absolutely written for and intended to be set in the hands of the people we want to be growing readers and thinking individuals. So a book makes a few people uneasy. How can we dare to take it away from everyone?

And that’s the Monster Librarian, counting them down. America’s Top Ten Banned Books. Now go find a copy of one and read it! And find a second one, and give it to a teen or child who otherwise might miss out on some really good reads. Or at least some quality potty humor.

Written In Blood

I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian so much that I gave it away to someone I thought would love it just as much. I guess she did, because she never returned it. Sherman Alexie is just that good. Honestly, I couldn’t believe Meghan Cox Gurdon could possibly be calling his work depraved. It’s a book that opens eyes- not one that turns out the light.

I am thrilled that he wrote a response to the Wall Street Journal, in their Speakeasy blog, titled “Why The Best Kids’ Books Are Written In Blood”. And I think what he said about his personal experience with books is so important to the way adults think about teens’ reading. Their experiences, and their reading, are often multidimensional. No one made me follow up Inherit the Wind with Ira Stone’s thick biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Reading Carrie didn’t stop me from reading Little Women. It doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of situation. And this is what Alexie expresses in a very personal way. He writes,

“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life”.

I know that’s an awfully long quote, but I think his words here are so important. In her book Don’t Tell The Grownups, Alison Lurie writes about how the very nature of important children’s books is subversive. Those books aren’t written to make grownups feel comfortable. They continue to be important because children need to find within themselves what makes grownups uncomfortable, and those books are where they discover how to live in a world in which they have very little control.

Thank you, Mr. Alexie, for speaking up.