Right to choose: banned, challenged books throughout history worth reading

Author Art Spiegelman told CNN recently that the ban of his book 'Maus' for crude language was ‘myopic’ and represents a ‘bigger and stupider’ problem than any with his specific work. Photo: AFP

A Tennessee school board’s recent ban on Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the conclusion to a story we’ve already seen. A group of adults, whether it be parents or teachers, finds a book’s content to be so offensive that they call for it to be pulled from shelves, taken off syllabi or even banned entirely from schools.

In the case of Maus – which details Spiegelman’s father’s experience of the Holocaust – it was “inappropriate language and nudity” that caused a Tennessee school board to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. But many have criticised its removal as just another case in a trend of schools targeting books that teach the history of oppression. Books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have famously topped the American Library Association’s (ALA) lists of most challenged books throughout the years, with more recent examples including anti-racist books such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped.