Banned Books Week – Get involved in our Blogathon!

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

— Oscar Wilde

Banned Books Week

We’re avid bookworms here at Quotables HQ, and we’re also big advocates of intellectual freedom – Quotables is all about sharing and making publicly available the very best nuggets of wisdom and inspiration for the online community to enjoy. So we were excited to get involved in Banned Books Week, an initiative launched by the American Libraries Association (ALA), to celebrate the freedom to read.

The week aims to highlight the benefits to free and open access to information, drawing attention to the harm of censorship and promoting intellectual freedom by ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints. 

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

— Unknown

We’re going to be talking banned books all week here on the blog, tweeting great quotes from censored authors over the years, and gathering together the ultimate collection of controversial quotations over at Quotables.

Get Involved

We’re also hosting a Banned Books Blogathon! If you’re a book-loving blogger and would like to write a guest post on banned books for Quotables, or if you want a post at your own blog to be featured in our blog round-up, drop us an email at hello@quotabl.es with your details.

Get Reading!

To get things started, here’s some great resources for information on challenged and banned books.

• The American Library Association has an excellent download section with lists of challenged and banned books, badges for your webpage, banned book week activity suggestions, and more.

• New York Times suggests 10 Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week, with lots of stories about the most challenged books and the groups that support intellectual freedom.

• American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression lists the stories behind past book bans and challenges.

• The Guardian posts the Top 10 Most Challenged Titles for 2010.

• The ALA’s Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009
   
• Another great story from the Guardian: Campaigners defend ‘celebrated novels’ from US censors.
   
• Banned Books Week.org has a list of events, event ideas, and an impressive map of banned and challenged books.  

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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