It’s Banned Books Week! Wooooooooo!
I love Banned Books Week. I love getting all ragey about people trying to ban or challenge books. I love making sweet displays and honestly, I love and need the reminder to be careful about selection and collection development. Just because there is a book that I don’t really want to read doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t buy it for the library. This mostly comes up in regards to Christian fiction. I am a Christian, but man do I hate Christian fiction. I have to force myself to buy YA fiction from Zondervan and the like because there might be some people who want to read it. Banned Books Week is always a good reminder of this.
A focus of this year’s Banned Books Week is comics, so make sure you go read some awesome comics, banned or not. Might I suggest Saga, Sex Criminals (main character is a librarian! Woo!), or the Rat Queens? They are all sufficiently saucy so you feel like someone could object to them.
In other not-really-banned-book news, someone protested that Leigh Bardugo had “unnecessary lesbians” in the third book of her amazing YA trilogy of Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising. If you like fantasy, fake imperialist Russia, and magic then these books are for you. They are really great. They remind me a bit of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone books, which I love. Bardugo’s response is delightful so check it out.
Here’s another plug for comics: for some reason it’s been the month of me saying, “Awww yissss!” It’s all Kate Beaton’s fault. (Slightly NSFW because of the swear….) Then a coworker said it to me in a email and I thought, “Another Kate Beaton fan!? YISS!” If you don’t read her comics, you’re a dummy. She’s hilarious and from Canada so she’s so nice!
Finally, Banned Books Week is also a great week because it leads into my birthday on Sunday. This year it’s my Golden Birthday, meaning I’m turning 28 on the 28th. I expect year 28 to be amazing!
lcarslibrarian 
