Arts & Entertainment

Sex, Profanity and Witchcraft: It's Banned Book Week at the Library

Celebrate the First Amendment at the library this week by picking up a book that's had to fight to be read.

If there's something about a book being banned, censored, censured or otherwise proscribed that makes you want to read it, then you'll enjoy Banned Books Week, which starts Saturday at the .

Adele Druck, a member of the Friends of the Library, told Patch that the group organized the week-long event by taking the lead from the American Library Association, which has declared September 24-October 1 'Banned Books Week.'

According to Druck, senior librarian accumulated and curated a selection of books that have either been banned or what she referred to as "challenged", where a ban has been attempted.

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The event, said Druck, is a celebration of the right to free speech.

"It’s a freedom issue," Druck said, "you can’t keep information from people, otherwise you don’t have a free society."

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Books on offer at the library (either on the shelf, or, if another customer has checked it out, by ordering it from another LAPL branch) include classics that have landed in trouble for content deemed by its censors and would-be-censors to be problematic: Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Leaves of Grass, Brave New World, 1984, Madame Bovary and Slaugher House-Five are all on the library's list. So is Harry Potter, which sometimes receives the ire of school boards for allegedly promoting witchcraft. 

Druck's favorite book from the banned list is Huckleberry Finn; she also remembers reading Gone With the Wind as a child.

"I heard it was a very sexy book when I was 12," she said, "and I couldn't wait to read Lady Chatterley."

Banned Books Week, September 24–October 1, , 18231 Ventura Blvd.


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