LIFESTYLESSUNDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2010 1CBANNED!

BANNED!

For booklovers, the listof challengedand banned

books would be hilarious if it wasn’t sounsettling.

The list, a verylong one, includes“Little House on thePrairie,” “Moby-Dick,” “The Grapesof Wrath,” “LittleWomen,” the dic-tionary and evenEric Carle’s chil-dren’s book “BrownBear, Brown Bear,What Do You See?”—TheTexasBoardofEducationbanneditbecause theauthorhas the samenameas an obscure Marxist theorist and no

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one bothered to check if they were thesame person.

“People are just shocked,” said KimbraCole, the youth services librarian at thePendleton Public Library. “They thinkthat this happened a long time ago, and wesay ‘No, it’s happening right now.’”

Cole, like librarians and booksellersacross the country, celebrated BannedBooks Week last week with displays of sur-prisingly banned books.

But it’s not the surprises that concernslibrarians most, such as the Illinois PoliceAssociation’s challenge of William Steig’s

The dictionary — Both the Merri-

am-Webster and the American

Heritage Dictionaries have been

banned in various schools. A Califor-

nia elementary school banned the

Merriam-Wester version in January

2010 for its definition of oral sex.

“It’s just not age appropriate,” a dis-

trict representative said.

The American Library Association’s

10 most surprising banned books

Dallas

See BOOKS/3C

See LIST/3C