Forbidden Print

Stephen's Lighthouse presents a clever idea, inspired by the teenager who's running an "illegal library" of banned books out of his/her locker at school (like all the numerous people on whose blogs I've read about it, I love this--if the story is new to you, it's linked in the Stephen's Lighthouse post).

Stephen's idea is that ALA should get together a collection of the books banned by this student's school, in e-form, and provide it to school and public libraries for free in honor of Judith Krugman.

I like this thought, although schools that ban these books in print would presumably just decline to offer access to them in e-form as well, so I don't know that it specifically gets around any rules that way.

Not that it should even be our goal to thwart the regulations of private institutions. But we can certainly cheer on internal rebellion on the part of those directly affected, right? Which I certainly do in wishing the illegal library much success, and the students much enjoyment of their forbidden reading.

I did think it was amusing that the student includes Interview with the Vampire in the illegal library, but spurns Twilight. I'd be interested in a heated debate about the relative merits of these two texts--not necessarily as a participant, but for educational purposes--because they both seemed like wildly overdramatic hot-vampire-mystique froth to me.

Mmm, froth.