This week I was twiddling my thumbs and thinking of new ways to make reading exciting for all of my very favorite people in the world (read: the two of you who pick up the Wednesday paper for the arts section and not the Graph Giraffe) when yet another one of my brilliant ideas occurred to me. What do college students like to do more than sitting, eating free unhealthy food and/or watching TV?
Nothing, you say? My friend, everyone knows what people really love to do more than anything else is break the rules they're told not to. Usually, when it comes to Madison, that involves some underage imbibing of an aqueous solution made through distillation (beer for the slow ones among you) or smoking of questionable substances, but I've got a new way for everyone on campus to thwart The Man.
Lucky for you guys it doesn't involve protesting or erecting a sunken Statue of Liberty on Lake Mendota in December (it's too cold out there for that). What I'm thinking will get everyone excited about both exercising their rights and reading is...banned books!
These books, for one reason or another, are disliked by a certain amount of entirely insane people so incensed by the subject matter that if they find you reading they might hunt you down and do the unthinkable. No, not bust up your Saturday night kegger (though I bet being the downers they are, they'd do that too), but they'd TAKE YOUR BOOK!
Anyway, since we all know telling people not to do something automatically means they want to go out and do it, I'm going to tell you NOT to go read a banned book. There I go again telling you not to read, but wait! Too late. You probably already have.
Basically everything you ever read in middle school, in class or under the bleachers, was a banned book somewhere.
Sure, you say, but that stuff all happened forever ago, in, like, the '60s right? Wrong, my naive friends. ""Catcher in the Rye,"" ""Harry Potter,"" even ""The Perks of Being a Wallflower,"" were all banned somewhere in the U.S. in the past two years. If that doesn't send you on a trip then perhaps you'd better start applying the drug-induced descriptions of the ""Perks of Being a Wallflower"" to your daily life.
After that, try using your newfound love for illicit reading material by getting into some grownup books. ""The Kite Runner"" by Khaled Hosseini is a recently banned book that's a great place to start, or even try a classic revolt against The Man and one of my personal favorites, ""1984"" by George Orwell.
If you'd rather go younger, pictures and all, ""And Tango Makes Three"" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell has been the most challenged book three years running, and get this, the subject matter? Baby penguins and adoption.
Still don't think book banning is a bad idea or that you've even read a banned book? Then I'm challenging you to go out and find out what all the fuss is about.
Rather spend your time reading banned books than doing banned substances? Tell Alex what's up at kuskowski@wisc.edu. She really loves e-mails. Seriously.
