BOOK OF THE MONTH-JANUARY 2015- TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE

Hello Spartans! This month we are featuring books that have been challenged or banned at one time or another. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a classic novel that has been challenged many times.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD- ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGED CLASSICS OF ALL TIME!

Racial slurs, profanity, and blunt dialogue about rape have led people to challenge its appropriateness in libraries and classrooms so often that, today, the American Library Association reports that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most challenged classics of all time and still ranks at number 21 of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 2000–2009. Even as recently as 2011 and amid 326 other book challenges for that year, it ranks in the top ten more than 50 years after seeing print.

This is literature using fiction at its best and mixing it with autobiographical elements to reflect a complex time in American history. Here we are almost 100 years after the events in To Kill a Mockingbird and we are once again facing a bleak and uncertain financial future; rapes still occur on a daily basis; and racial strife continues to permeate many aspects of social interaction. I think what upsets people the most about the themes in this book aren’t that they are in the book but that they did, and still do exist, outside of the pages of fiction in our supposedly modern and very real society. The truth is that these elements hit too close to home for many people and the easiest way to deal with that discomfort is to shove it back into the shadows of fear and ignorance rather than open a book, learn from history, and use that knowledge to create meaningful dialogues in order to examine and better our united futures.

                                                                   -American Library Association