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BANNED BOOKS WEEK - September 29–October 6 |
Banned Books Week (BBW) is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, it celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.
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Daddy's Roommate
by Michael Willhoite |
| A young boy discusses his divorced father's new living situation, in which the father and his gay roommate share eating, doing chores, playing, loving, and living. |
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And Tango Makes Three
by Justin Richardson |
| At New York City's Central Park Zoo, two male penguins fall in love and start a family by taking turns sitting on an abandoned egg until it hatches. |
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Nappy Hair
by Carolivia Herron |
| Various people at a backyard picnic offer their comments on a young girl's tightly curled, "nappy " hair. |
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Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank |
| A compilation of the notebooks and papers left behind by a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank, when she and her family were taken from their hiding place in Amsterdam by German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. |
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain |
| Relates the adventures and struggles of a rambunctious young southern boy in the early 19th century. Portrays river life in a developing America, and young Huckleberry Finn's adventures while on the journey from boyhood to manhood. |
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Crazy Lady!
by Jane Leslie Conly |
| As he tries to come to terms with his mother's death, Vernon finds solace in his growing relationship with the neighborhood outcasts, an alcoholic and her retarded son. |
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The Chocolate War
by Robert Cormier |
| A high school freshman discovers the devasting consequences of refusing to join in the school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of the school bullies. |
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Whale Talk
by Chris Crutcher |
| Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students. |
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Convicted and imprisoned because she was unwilling to name her partner in adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet "A" on the breast of her gown for the remainder of her life. |
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee |
| The setting is a dusty southern town during the Depression. A white woman accuses a black man of rape. No lawyer will step forward to defend him - except Finch, the town's most distinguished citizen. |
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Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens |
| The story of an orphan who falls into the hands of a group of thieves in the slums of London. A work of fiction portraying the misery of daily life for the urban poor and the uncaring bureaucracies that sustain an oppressive system. |
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The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer |
| A group of stories written in the closing of the 14th century. Chaucer describes the 29 individuals who meet in preparation for a pilgrimage to the popular shrine of Thomas a Becket at the Canterbury Cathedral. |
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger |
| Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school. |
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller |
| The novel concerns the efforts of Capt. John Yossarian, a bombardier with the 256th U.S. Air Force Squadron, to be removed from combat duty after he witnesses numerous friends being killed in action. |
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley |
| A satire in which science, sex, and drugs have replaced human reason and human emotion in the "perfect" society to which Huxley gives the name "Utopia." |
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Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck |
| In depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences. |
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Black Like Me
by John Howard Griffin |
| Written in journal form, the personal narrative presents an introspective look at racism, examining its consequences in a chronicle of the experiences of a Caucasian social scientist who darkens his skin, shaves his head and assumes the life of an African-American man in the Deep South in 1959. |
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath |
| Young and gifted poet, Esther Greenwood, is trapped in a private world of terror. Esther can't seem to harmonize the harsh realities of life with her own perfectionist thinking. From college through early job hunting and singles life in New York, we see Esther and her friends coping with the pressures of school, sexual relationships and drugs until each reaches the final path for their adult lives. |
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Another Country
by James Baldwin |
| A novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. |
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The Group
by Mary, 1912 McCarthy |
| The Group relates the story of eight women, graduates of the Vassar College class of 1933, who formed a clique while undergraduates. Inspired by the progressive thinking that they enjoyed at Vassar, the young women approach life with enthusiasm and with the expectations of those who have experienced privileged educations. |
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury |
| The story of an oppressive society in which books are forbidden objects and firemen are required to burn all books they encounter. |
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Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio |
| The premise of the collection of tales is that 10 young men and women, secluded for a time to escape the plague, divert themselves by telling stories on a variety of topics. Each must tell one story per day on a specific theme, for a total of 100 tales. Of the total, only eight tales are purely erotic while the remainder deal with social criticism, the outwitting of one person by another and the criticism of nuns and priests. |
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Candide
by 1694-1778 Voltaire |
| A satire of optimism and of the belief that "the world is the best of all possible worlds and everything in it is a necessary evil," a theory attributed to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Voltaire refused to accept the philosopher's assertion that evil and death are part of a universal harmony, and he structured Candide to show the ridiculous nature of such thought. |
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| Although the American anti-slavery movement had existed at least as long as the nation itself, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) galvanized public opinion as nothing had before. Its vivid dramatization of slavery's cruelties so aroused readers that it is said Abraham Lincoln told Stowe her work had been a catalyst for the Civil War. |
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison |
| A sad and tragic novel that recounts the abuse and destruction of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American girl whose mother knew that her very dark baby would grow into an unattractive young girl. Pecola begins to believe that life would be prettier and better if she were white, and she views blue eyes as symbolic of whiteness. |
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An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser |
| A young man trying to get into high society is torn between his ties to a factory girl and his attraction to a wealthy girl. |
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