You can tell true things by lying.

(That quote is from Neil Gaiman. He's the king. Or at the very least, an arch-duke of some kind.)

It's coming in a little late, to be sure, but I just found out that September 25 - October 2 is Banned Books Week. I found this out by hearing it announced on tv, which I found slightly ironic. They were talking about sci-fi and fantasy books being banned, so they interviewed a number of the genre's authors, and I thought Neil best summed up my feelings on the matter. I wonder how many of the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books I've read, and because I had nothing but procrastinating to do, I looked it up. I have read (and enjoyed) the following Most Challenged books:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
The Giver by Lois Lowry
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford

This list has my favourite novel of all time (Brave New World), my favourite American novel of all time (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and my favourite author when I was a kid(Roald Dahl). So I guess it's safe to say that whatever the people who tried to ban these books were trying to do, they sadly didn't help me. Some of the authors and books on the list weren't surprising to me, which isn't to say I support their inclusion, just that I can see where the misguided people who tried to ban the books were coming from. But Where's Waldo?