Banning books? We're still doing that?

While I normally stay away from politics, I'm still a little disappointed at all of the drama over The Perks of Being a Wallflower being pulled from school shelves in the Valley.

The most recent story (Thurs) involved a local teacher who stopped teaching Hawthorne for fear of backlash. Umm...yeah.

I didn't dig school until college. I was the student teachers claimed: "is an A student" who "just doesn't apply himself." In reality, I was the student who would have rather read something like Wallflower rather than The Canterbury Tales. Don't get me wrong, Chaucer is amazing...for an adult. For youth, he's about as engaging as a church sermon.

The books I did read in youth were ones I'd smuggled from my parents' books: King, Sheldon, and other masters of pulp fiction. Inappropriate? Maybe. But it was the allure of reading something I shouldn't have been that made me devour such books with haste. It could just as easily have been Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, or William Burroughs.

At least The Roanoke Times acknowledged that banning books ALWAYS has the opposite effect: kids and adults alike clamor for and seek out the banned books to see what the excitement is about. In that way, maybe banning is key to getting youth fired up about books.

Just so the local library still carries them, that is.