Keep calm and read a banned book

Libraries get it.

Murphy Library at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse will participate in the perfect response to efforts to ban books. It will read them aloud.

It will host a “read out” in which community members will read from books that have been challenged in public, school or academic libraries, the La Crosse Tribune reports today.

The Freedom to Read event next Tuesday is intended to highlight the dangers of censoring books, ideas, and persons.

The paper doesn’t say what books are on the agenda, but the national organization advocating Banned Books Week next week says these are the most frequency challenged young-adult books in the last year.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon Books/Knopf Doubleday)
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston)
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster)
Drama, by Raina Telgemeier (Graphix/Scholastic)
Chinese Handcuffs, by Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins)
The Giver, by Lois Lowry (HMH Books for Young Readers)
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros (Vintage/Knopf Doubleday)
Looking for Alaska, by John Green (Dutton Books/Penguin Random House)

Libraries across the nation plan to display and encourage readership of banned books.