This year's Banned Books Week is October 1st through October 7th, as organized by the American Library Association. In honor of the week, the Riverfront and Will Libraries will be putting up banned book displays (seen below!), and the Crestwood Library will be running "Banned Book Bingo," awarding prizes to anyone who completes four banned books.
Banned Books Week is about choice. We will always hear out requests to consider the inclusion of materials -- their placement and their value to our collection. But Yonkers Public Library is committed to giving you, the people of Yonkers, the chance to decide what you want to read, by giving you a collection, as strong and flexible as we can make it, and an unrestricted right to read anything on our shelves, no matter its content. But banning a book from the library means taking away your right to decide. And more than anything else, we trust you to know what you want and what's healthy for you and your families, personally. You know what you care about, what you think is worth exploring, and we support that interest, so you can make the most informed decision possible.
As a sampler of the banned books we offer: ranking among America's most frequently banned books are Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a bestseller by one of America's most beloved black speculative fiction authors; Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, a classic feminist alternate-history book, adapted into a multiple-award-winning television series; one of the 20th century's most banned books, The Color Purple, was also the first work by a black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction! Consider also Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, or the graphic adaptation of Walter Dean Myers's Monster, or even Alan Moore's classic Watchmen, if you're a comics buff. Or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic of its era -- or, for YA readers, gripping reads like The Hate U Give, The Kite Runner, dystopian classic series The Hunger Games, and even the world-renowned Harry Potter franchise (one of the most frequently banned book series of the 2000s!). And in nonfiction terms, included on recent book ban lists coming out of Florida's Palm Beach County, we have Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail -- a letter that moved nations.
So this week, we'd like to encourage you to read your fill of books banned and challenged across the USA, as many as our collections can provide. Not because they'll help you to grow as a person (though they might!), help you learn history (though they might!) or help you empower yourself (and they very well might!). It's because we respect your freedom to read whatever you like, which making sure that you can read banned books, no matter what.