Here's an article about FTRW that appeared in Xtra.ca (“Where Queers Conspire”). They asked various Canadian literary types and free speech proponents to give their thoughts on some common and/or recently challenged books. From the article's introduction:Canada is a censorious country. Our nanny state bans most hate speech (not the religious-based homophobic kind), stops erotica […]
What's FTRW without a couple stories about Peggy Atwood… Her books are currently being challenged in a Toronto school by a parent who says: “…if students repeated some of the words from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the school halls, they'd be suspended, so he questions why it is okay in the classroom.” But […]
Canada’s Freedom to Read Week begins today and continues until February 28. As I did last year and the year before, I’m planning to do a week long series of posts on current happenings and issues around this topic.I’m not sure if he planned it to coincide with FTRW or not but a colleague at RPL posted […]
– Just watched “The Reader” and after a slow start, it turned out to be quite an enjoyable film. Plus I don't think it's a spoiler to mention that a helpful prison librarian plays a small part in the movie near the end – always a bonus to see librarians in films and a double-bonus […]
Yet more follow-up on the “Sarah Palin attempted to ban books” story – this one a bit more legitimate sounding than the last one. “The author of the book Sarah Palin reportedly tried to have removed from her hometown library blasted back Saturday evening, saying the Alaska Governor had a “small-town mind,” was an enemy […]
Pretty funny clip and Damon does mention the thing about her banning books so that's cool! Oh, but if you've seen an e-mail flying around supposedly listing the books she tried to ban, that's false. Too bad but if you look at the list, it basically looks like the ALA's “100 Most Challenged Books of […]
When Jessamyn West was here for SLA, this topic came up at the after-event gathering. I meant to post something about it at that time when the story was still somewhat fresh but never got to it, being as busy as I was with much more important matters like cute baby pictures and Flash-based Friday […]
Continuing yesterday's trend of posting items long after their “best before” date, here's a press release from the Canadian Library Association summarizing their second annual survey of challenges to materials in Canadian libraries.Oliver Twist, The Golden Compass and Rolling Stone magazine were among the library materials challenged by Canadian library users in 2007, according to […]
Author Nicholson Baker takes a look at Wikipedia and includes a critique of the number of articles being deleted for less-than-solid reasons. [Edit to add a link to the article which is a pretty important detail to leave out!]In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some […]
Tories plan to withhold funding for 'offensive' productions“Would this committee put money into Juno? It might not want to encourage teen pregnancy. Would the government put money into a film with a dirty title, like Young People Fucking? Would they invest in something like Brokeback Mountain? They might not want to encourage gay cowboys to […]
