Slightly Overwhelmed...

Life seems to be picking up the pace these days and I'm not sure I like that idea.  I actually really don't like it.  I feel like I'm failing everyone including myself, especially myself at my inability to balance and do everything that needs to be done.... *gah*

But oddly I still feel the need to pass on something - 10 Most Frequently Challenged Books from last year.  Now you might not be aware but every public and school library has books that can be challenged and removed from circulation.  Book banning makes me mad.  I will say that it makes me mad on the level it makes PETA mad every time a chicken becomes a KFC meal (and for the record that doesn't make me happy).  It actually makes me mad on the level that whatever PTA I'm apart of will likely egg my house out of frustration with my insistence that no book should be banned.  I know there are going to be people who say that they are not appropriate for children.  Read the book then yourself and have your child/teenager read it and then discuss it.  Ideas are not lethal if they are discussed and challenged.  They are only destructive if we do not equip ourselves and those we are responsible for with ways of negotiating, challenging and respecting or accepting them. 

As an aside number 10 on the list is Twilight.  I will admit I have read the series. There is nothing remotely offensive in the series - there is implied sex AFTER marriage, and there is violence which is described but not by any means graphic.  So what in there has the after 12 year old not be exposed to in the advertising media?  Books like Twilight as much as I loathe them, they are easily consumable, like Harry Potter, and open children/young adults up to the wonders of reading if they haven't found it already.  So bugger off crazy parents.  That or pick up a classic - Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Vanity Fair and the list goes on because everyone one of those entrenched classics has at least one of the following: racism, rape, violence (bloody at that), sexism, cannibalism, elitism, homosexuality, transgender issues/themes, adultery and the ism's go on.

Okay my rant is done, carry on now - hopefully to your local library.