Celebrate Banned Books Week by Reading!!

And that is what I've been doing – reading.

Two books that I read recently are The Case of the Missing Books and The Book Stops Here, by Ian Sansom. They relate the hilarious adventures (and amateur sleuthing) of a Jewish, vegetarian librarian who moves from London to a small Irish town to run the local mobile library. Those are the first and third titles in the author's Mobile Library Mystery series, but somehow I missed #2 (Mr. Dixon Disappears) in the series -- so I will have to go back to the bookstore and find that one.

And then I came across Ian Sansom's website, which is just as much fun to read as his books. His "Preface" page was the first one that I landed on, and I loved what he had to say about reading, writing, and libraries:

" . . . I write because I read, and I read because I write, the two being pretty much inseparable in my mind, . . . I don’t know which came first, the reading or the writing, but I do know that I started reading because of libraries. . . . Libraries are places where you go to invent and reinvent yourself, or maybe just to use the toilet, if they have toilet facilities, and to find out how other people have reinvented themselves, and what they’ve written on the walls, and the desks, and in the books; they’re a wonderful hiding place, but also a way back out into the world. . . ." (http://www.iansansom.net/preface.html)

The importance of our right to read was brought home to me again when I received an email from the librarian at the high school (from which I just retired) – she is facing a formal challenge to one of the books in the library, a book written by an award-winning American author. She has my full support. She also shared this with me – Rain: An Original Poem, by Billy Collins

Remember, in order to keep our freedom to read, we must defend it.

Banned Books Week -- September 27 - October 4, 2008