Essay On Book Banning

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” (Rushdie). How many books have you read and felt like “oh my gosh there's no way i should be able to read this book.” Many books today are getting banned because it may offend one person and take it personal so they'll get the book banned from schools or libraries. When the author is writing the book they shouldn't have to worry about what others are gonna get offended by. Obviously they can't just write a book bashing a specific group or person but to the most they can write just about whatever they want. The process of getting a book should be changed because too many books are getting banned just because of one person, there has to be other ways to fix this problem. One of the main goals of this research paper was to figure out what exactly censorship is. Why is there censorship in today's work of arts? The dictionary states that censorship is the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security, which is spot on. The New Yorker posted a great article on censorship which was written by Salman Rushdie in the recent months of 2018 and it talked about more about what censorship is and how it may affect artists. It goes on to talk about how “Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.” This is basically saying that with censorship, artists don't have the ability to do what they want but they'll work around it. They also made a good point by putting out there that if we have to worry about our freedom of what we can and can't do, are we really free as they say we are? We also wanted to figure out why different works of art are getting banned, but mostly why books are. Why can't an author write whatever …show more content…
I chose The Bridge to Terabithia written by Katherine Paterson, which is about a boy, Jess, and his best friend, Leslie, create a world of their own in the wood right outside from their homes. To me nothing seemed wrong with the book or the plot, or atleast to the point where i would've been like “oh my gosh, there's no way this book should be out there and able to be read by middle schoolers because it's so inappropriate.” There was an article posted by Banned Books Awareness and Reading for Knowledge Project, written by R. Wolf Baldassarro. He stated that in 2012 Connecticut wanted the book banned from middle school classrooms because they claimed that it promoted witchcraft and violence. Baldassarro states many reasons why the book is banned in different places and another reason was because the use of “Lord” outside of prayer, as well as the death of Leslie in the later part of the book. The use of language in the book, he says, got the idea and set a bad image on life which wouldn't be a good read for younger students. The Bridge to Terabithia was ranked in at number 8 for over a decade n the top one-hundred banned/challenged books from 1990-2000. Many schools set out petitions to get the book banned because of the reasons stated