RFS 2nd Annual Banned Books Week

In honor of
Banned Books Week 
(Sept 24th - October 1st)

Reading For Sanity will be posting our reviews of banned or challenged books each day
throughout the week. 

Check back to see
what books we've read and
 don't forget to enter our
banned books giveaway!

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A Banned Books Week Declaration
Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one's opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.

Reading For Sanity celebrates the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, September 24th through October 1st, 2011 and encourages free people to read freely, according to the dictates of their own conscience, now and forever.

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy, and reading is among our greatest freedoms. Privacy is essential to the exercise of that freedom, and the right to privacy is the right to open inquiry without having the subject of one's interest examined or scrutinized by others.

The freedom to read is protected by our Constitution.  Some individuals, groups, and public authorities work to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label "controversial" views, to distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to purge libraries of materials reflecting the diversity of society.

Both governmental intimidation and the fear of censorship cause authors who seek to avoid controversy to practice self-censorship, thus limiting our access to new ideas.  Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of American society and leaves it less able to deal with controversy and difference.

Americans still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression, and can be trusted to exercise critical judgment, to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe, and to exercise the responsibilities that accompany this freedom.  Intellectual freedom is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture.  Conformity limits the range and variety of inquiry and expression on which our democracy and our culture depend; and

The American Library Association's Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year as a reminder to Americans not to take their precious freedom for granted.

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Original Declaration found here.