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…
