"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."

The above quote is taken from author Oscar Wilde. He is one of my favorite authors along with many others in the world that have most likely had a book banned or at least, their book was in talks to be banned. Now, many of you reading this have most likely read the little description under that fancy title. Most of you may not even care if books get banned or may not even know what book banning is. Well, this blog is going to go into detail on what book banning is, what it does, why it happens and why it needs to be changed. I believe that everyone should be aware of book banning and know the consequences of banning books.

When a book is banned it means that free access to them is not permitted. That means that books that are banned, aren’t always available to the public for use whenever a person wants it. Now, books can be banned for any kind of reason really, but the three main general reasons are: political, religious, or moral motivations. Usually, religion is the main culprit for books being banned. Books being banned can have negative and positive ramifications. The author of the work most likely spent a huge amount of time of their life writing it and then they see that it is banned. Now, all authors know in the back of their mind that their book may be banned, but they never expect it to happen. I’ve honestly never heard an author say that they wrote a book just so it could get banned. There’s also the other side of the situation. If a book happens to be banned, usually its sales will go up because more people will want to read it to see why it was banned in the first place. This doesn’t always pan out that way though, because some people may not read the book because it is banned.

A lot of books are banned in various countries for very different reasons, some are actually valid points but others are, let’s be honest, just be plain silly. When The Da Vinci Code was released, the Catholic Church had a field day about it because it was offensive to Christianity. It ended up being banned in Lebanon because of that very reason. In the 1930’s, Hunan, China banned Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland simply because Carroll depicted animals on the same complexity level as humans.

So, books can be banned for really any reason at all, no matter how silly. Books can be banned on a national (a country or two) or sub national level (a town or a community). All it takes is one person to cause a ruckus about a book and then more and more people will join the bandwagon and sometimes a book will be banned.

Over the course of this semester, I will be examining the process of book banning and why people feel that certain books should be banned while others are free to adorn the shelves at Barnes & Noble’s everywhere. Book banning doesn’t really have any ‘rules’ to it. Any book can be banned for virtually any reason. There needs to be a system or a checklist that you have to go down to actually have a book be banned. I consider book banning to be a problem that needs to be resolved somehow. This blog will be my outlet to trying to think of a better way to deal with this than simply banning the book.