October Library Newsletter

From the Bible to The Hate U Give: a completely updated look at the history of censorship in world literature. Throughout history, nations, peoples, and governments have censored writers and their works on political, religious, sexual, and social grounds. Although the literary merit of the majority of these books has been proven time and time again, censorship efforts are still in place today. From Animal Farm to The Grapes of Wrath, The Koran to The Talmud, Beloved to the Harry Potter series, The Canterbury Tales to Catch-22, this revised edition examines the many struggles these books faced in order to be read.

For the Love of Books is a book about books--and the inside stories about the people who write them. Learn how books evolved, what lies behind some of the greatest tales ever told, and who's really who in the world of fiction. From banned books to famous feuding authors, from literary felons to rejected masterpieces, from tips for aspiring writers to stand-out book lists for readers to catch up on, For the Love of Books is a celebration of the written word and an absolute page-turner for any book lover.

Meg Murry, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin are guided by unearthly strangers as they go on a journey through space and time to search for Meg's and Charles' scientist father who has disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government. This groundbreaking sci-fi/fantasy tale captures the classic struggle between good and evil, the power of love, and the value of individuality. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic Time Quintet.

A quote from the book: "Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."

The hero-narrator of this novel is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices -- but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all.

A quote from the book: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. 

A quote from the book: "There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

(Isn't it ironic that a book about the dangers of banning books would itself be banned?!)

In To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee uses memorable characters to explore civil rights and racism in the segregated Southern United States of the 1930s. The coming of age story is narrated by Scout Finch and chronicles events from her childhood as her father Atticus Finch, an attorney, strives to prove the innocence of a black man unjustly accused of rape. The events of the story take place while Scout is a young child, but the sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structure of the story indicate that Scout tells the story many years after the events described, when she has grown to adulthood.

The novel was published in 1960 and went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1962 film starring Gregory Peck. 

A quote from the book: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the second novel in the Harry Potter series. The plot follows Harry's second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, during which a series of messages on the walls of the school's corridors warn that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened and that the heir of Slytherin would kill all pupils who are "mudbloods" (wizards with non-magical ancestors).

The idea of tolerance within a community is highly important in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The plot of the novel explores this idea through Salazar Slytherin's intention to wipe out all mudbloods from Hogwarts. 

A quote from the book: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Jonas is a boy living in a community based on Sameness which is a society built on the idea that everything must be the same and that people should not be different from one another. At the age of 12, children are assigned their jobs, which they will train for and do for the rest of their lives. Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory, and The Giver (the old Receiver) begins giving Jonas ancient memories. The Receiver acts as a source of wisdom for the community. As Jonas starts to receive memories, he discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. The Giver won the Newbery Medal Award in 1994.

A quote from the book: "If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!"

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family were cut off from the outside world facing hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary, Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

A quote from the book: "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. Set in the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom, Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways. 

A quote from the book: "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that would take a long, long time."