Category: books

a few follow-ups regarding The Higher Power of Lucky

Posted on by jessamyn

Just a few more links to sort of follow-up the wildly popular post about the Newbery award winning book The Higher Power of Lucky and some controversy concerning the mutliple uses of the word “scrotum.” I’ve been reading a lot of the commentary and I still can’t tell whether this is a real issue with two strong sides, or if it’s a few librarians who decided not to purchase the book for whatever reason that got blown totally out of proportion. We may never know. What we do know is that people love to flip out about librarians banning books [both in “how dare they!” and “we would never do that!” ways depending which side of the fence you’re on] and the tricky issue of censorship vs selection has no easy answers. Here is some further reading.

  • My Scrotum Week – I think this title is a take off on Harvey Pekar’s book Our Cancer Year in which case it’s even more brilliant than I first thought. It’s a blog by a teacher describing what happened when she read the book to her 4th graders and then they talked about the controversy, together.
  • four letters to the editor about the original editorial in the New York Times.
  • Neil Gaiman loves librarians unconditionally, but he is worried about some of us.
  • Last but not least, as I was looking around Technorati to see who else had been writing about this, I was amused by the ads Google decided to serve me…

what keywords are these

scrotum!

Posted on by jessamyn

The Newbery award winning book this year — The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron who is also a librarian — contains the word scrotum, not once, but a few times. Apparently this is a problem for some librarians and parents who have been challenging and/or removing the book from school library shelves according to some short discussion on LM_NET (link dead, search the archives here). I read the mailing list archives and it didn’t seem like a big brouhaha to me, but feel free to read it over yourselves. Thanks to the power of the blogonets, you can read the author’s response to the criticisms as well as a response from AS IF, young adult authors who support intellectual freedom.

Update: The New York Times has also mentioned this story, but I’m not sure how they thought librarian.net was an “electronic mailing list.” They also go on to claim “Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase” which I have never heard of before, either the sneaking or the banning. If anyone would like to enlighten me to other examples in the comments, I’d appreciate it. Also note, if it’s unclear or maybe you haven’t been here before and don’t know the place, I think the scrotum-bashers are over the top on this.

e-government shunting extra work to libraries?

Posted on by jessamyn

FreeGovInfo has this post by Chris Zamarelli about how the perception of libraries as being good places to get access to e-goverment resources is a mixed blessing for libraries who lack staffing and other resources to actually act as public information officers. The huge bummer is that this would be a great role for libaries to fill, IF library staff had better training and suitable funding to actually carry out these positions effectively.

but what are people really reading

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m fascinated by the Public Lending Right scheme wherein authors receive money from the government for the lending of their books in public libraries. Nothing like having a little money involved to get accurate statistics on who is reading what. One author reports on what people are actually reading at the library.

The truth is that public libraries have become a service for the very young – the place where you go to inspire the nippers with a love for literature. For better or worse (and I’d say worse), they are no longer where many adults go in search of information (what’s Google for, after all?).

If adults go at all, it seems that it’s hardback fiction that they are mainly after. Josephine Cox and Danielle Steel came in second and third place in PLR’s top twenty last year (with sales in Steel’s case totalling over 500 million, I’m not quite sure this is the kind of struggling writers that the Brophy’s had in mind). And so far as I can see, there were no authors of non-fiction for adults in the top hundred; though Terry Deary, who wrote the Rotten Romans etc for kids, non-fictin of a kind, does get there.