We’ve been talking about book banning at our house and I promised to get it on record that my daughters are a little fired up about the whole thing.

Harry Potter?
Tom Sawyer?
The Lorax? 

Sheesh!
Is nothing sacred?

But it was when Roald Dahl got tossed into the fray that my Small One said,
"That’s it. Now I’m really kind of mad about this."

I’m with her.

For a nation that spends a whole heck of a lot of time and space talking about freedom, we’ve been a little lackadaisical when it comes to the freedom to read. The lists of books that have been successfully banned — pulled off of shelves, taken off of syllabi, shut out of libraries — is formidable. And, I’m not ashamed to say, some of my favorite books — and my kids’ favorite books — are on those lists. 

I’m okay with other folks not reading them if they don’t want to, but I’m not okay with those folks telling us we can’t read them. That’s just be a little bit too 1984 for our own good. Y’know?

So. 
This week is Banned Books Week.
Not a bad time to pick up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Or The Chocolate War.
Or James and the Giant Peach.
And read it. 
In public.
To your students.
Or your children.

To talk about how reading is a right, about how reading this book or that book is a choice — a choice we sometimes make with guidance or advice, but a choice nonetheless. One that ought not be taken away from us unless we want to get ourselves confused with the, um, regimes we consider dictatorial and unenlightened. We wouldn’t want that, would we?