Recently a coworker asked us to send some of our favorite Banned and Challenged book titles and a little snippet about it and/or why we love it. I emailed her back and said did she want them alphabetically, order of importance or just my favorite? How did I approach it? I thought, send a few favorite author(s), but that was too many. Just every book I read that has been B-and/or-C? Way too many to do. Therefore I said “Make it simple.” And found a […]
“Sometimes I feel like my brain is a machine built by someone who lost the instruction manual.”
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
I haven’t often re-read books in the past decade as I’ve gone on my Cannonball journey. But sometimes I revisit an old favorite, or earlier books in a series before continuing with the newly published. Due to my personal commitment to reading banned and challenged books it has also meant that our Banned Book Week book clubs have included re-reads. I try to review the re-reads on their own merits – what was the reading experience this time. But in the case of Gender Queer my […]
“Don’t worry about any of this stuff, okay? It’s all just adult junk that doesn’t mean anything.”
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki
This One Summer is a re-read for me. It is also the book I have read in the past few years specifically from the Banned Book List put out by the ALA that makes me scratch my head the most. It is because this is the book that hit #1 most challenged in 2016 and was why I read it in 2017. It then came back to the top ten in 2018. It did not make sense to me then, and it makes little sense […]
down to the wire (as always) – BOOK CLUB TIME!
All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Why did I wait so long to read these two? This isn’t just a question of Book Club procrastination; this is a “what was I thinking?” moment! I had heard good things about both, I was enraged as ever when they (and others) showed up on lists of challenged and banned books, and they were both available on scribd! Also- why did I treat these books like homework? “oh man, I have to read these before I can move on to other things”- at the […]
The book that inspired the Metallica video that freaked you the hell out in 1988
CBR 10 Bingo: Fahrenheit 451! (banned and challenged books) There’s no shortage of books that have been turned into movies, but relatively few have been turned into music videos by heavy metal bands. To be more accurate, the 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun, which was itself inspired by the true story of a Canadian soldier brutally injured in World War I, inspired a 1971 film by the same name, which inspired the Metallica song “One,” whose video features cuts from the film. Coincidentally, the book was […]
Stands up as allegory, less so as a novel
Bingo Square: Fahrenheit 451 Since I switched school districts (and states) between 9th and 10th grade, I ended up reading Lord of the Flies twice in high school English class. And I despised it both times. Despite that, I noticed at some point that it is a novel I refer to more than some novels I actually enjoyed in school so I had been meaning to do a reread for a while. After I chose it for the Fahrenheit 451 square, I realized it could […]