Banned Books - Animal Farm; Malinda Lo's Fight, Of Mice and Men

From The Velshi Banned Book Club:

I received the following from Lo & Behold, a newsletter from author Malinda Lo:

For those of you who want to join in this fight (if you're not already engaged), I suggest finding out what's happening in your local area and getting involved. There are many resources available to guide you. You can also give money to organizations that are fighting book bans; I've listed many of them on bluesky. If you’re not on bluesky, start with PEN America, Every Library, Florida Freedom to Read, and Texas Freedom to Read. Please follow them and support their work. If you’re an author (hi, fellow writers!), please join Authors Against Book Bans. Even if your own books haven’t yet been banned, we need you to join us.

You can sign up for her newsletter here. 

BANNED: Of Mice and Men (American Experience, PBS) has local significance:

Jodie Scales teaches English at Wapahani High School, in Selma, Indiana. She’s taught Of Mice and Men for the past five years. American Experience spoke to her about her experience.

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Does it surprise you that it still gets challenged?

If a parent is just seeing the language, or hearing some of the topics, and they haven’t actually read the book themselves, or sat down with an English teacher and talked about why this is such a good book to teach — then I guess I could understand how it might be challenged. 

On John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (PEN America)

While some of the complaints about the novel—particularly those about the book’s inclusion of racial slurs—certainly merit evaluation, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s a more fundamental reason that the book has repeatedly raised hackles. It is, after all, a work in which two men, who are not blood relatives, are deeply bonded. The strangeness of their partnership is evident both to the reader and to the people who George and Lennie encounter. Even Slim, the level-headed mule driver whom the two men admire notes, “I hardly never seen two guys travel together […] It jus’ seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you travelin’ together.”

sch 6/8