When I was growing up, my parents let me read anything I wanted. I read The Graduate when I was like, ten, right alongside Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, Ramona the Pest and The Book of Three. They never, never, never tried to stifle my intellectual curiosity. They did steer me towards great, amazing books -- from As You Like It to The Chronicles of Narnia. I don't think I've properly stopped to appreciate this enough.
Until today, when I was introduced to Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, a group operating out of Fairfax County, Virginia (where I coincidentally spent my elementary school years, reading whatever I wanted). Their list of bad books includes Beloved, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Love in the Time of Cholera, Things Fall Apart, and The Woman Warrior. These books are bad because they talk about sex, or worse, same sex couplings, or drugs, or, I don't know, use Spanish. Actually their website contains "bad" selections from the books that read just like those thumb throughs you did when you were a kid to find all the dirty parts. So enjoy!
