Fogbow

BANNED BOOKS WEEK
Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us: Banned Books Week 2021


Banned and challenged books have made us question the ways of the world — and sparked heated debates for as long as any of us can remember. Banned Books Week runs from 9/26 – 10/2 and the titles on this year’s list include the top 10 most challenged books of 2020 — some you know and, if not, maybe this is the year you read them.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Bluest Eye are the veterans of this list, and in the age of #MeToo and I May Destroy You, it’s stories like Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson that we look back on as an introduction, for many of us, to sexual assault and the power of speaking up.

Separating the work from the artist is an ongoing debate that no one seems to agree on. Known as one of the most frequently challenged books since its release, for its use of profanity and sexuality, National Book Award Winner, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Native American writer Sherman Alexie, have become the perfect example in recent years.

George — the Stonewall Award-winning debut by Alex Gino — is no stranger to the list. An important story about a transgender girl named Melissa and being true to who you are, even if it takes others a little while to get on board.

READERS WRITE
Sisters
BY OUR READERS • OCTOBER 2021

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MY SISTER MET CARL in the dive bar below his apartment. After a long night of drinking they went upstairs to his place.

Fifteen years later they still live in the same flat, across from the freeway exit and above what Elena calls Poo Alley — the downtown homeless camp. Carl still drinks a six-pack a night. Because my sister cleans, the apartment is not filthy like the hoarder house we grew up in, but the rooms are still filled with Carl’s cigarette smoke and the ever-present sounds of television.

Elena was dealt a rough hand: braces, acne, paralyzing anxiety, terrible vision. If she misplaces her glasses, you’ll find her squatting, arms outstretched, feeling the ground. Impersonating her doing this is one of Carl’s signature routines: he exaggerates her out-of-focus gaze and open mouth as she pats the floor.

In my thirties, on a mission to expose my sister to the world outside that apartment, I took her on getaways: spas, hot springs, backpacking. A few years ago she visited me in San Francisco. All week she walked a few feet behind me on the sidewalk. Whenever I stopped to look for her, she would run into me. Finally I asked why she kept trailing me. “Because I can’t see, and it’s easier to follow you,” she said bashfully.

My sister and I are twins: I was born first, and what the doctor thought was the placenta turned out to be Elena. Her head was small, so there was some concern about her health. “They did all kinds of tests — but you both were normal!” my father insists. Sometimes Elena gestures to me and says with a chuckle, “I was just her leftovers.”

The differences between us were obvious early on. The only thing I worried about on school-picture day was wearing my favorite barrette, but picture day caused Elena such anxiety she was once taken to the emergency room for a debilitating neck spasm. In junior high, after our mother died unexpectedly and our dad began drinking and hoarding, my sister dyed her hair black and became a goth. I was voted friendliest in our eighth-grade class.

After high school I got better and better jobs until I moved away to attend medical school. Elena got a position in a retirement-home dining hall and still works there more than twenty years later, making a little over minimum wage. She adores the residents. She’ll clutch her heart and tell me, “Oh! Mr. Petey died!” or, referring to a retired professor with Alzheimer’s, “I love my George.”

Now our father is dying. I’m too resentful of his years of alcoholism and dysfunction to want to care for him, and I dread the idea of touching his body. But Elena doesn’t mind. When the hospice nurse can’t come, my sister dresses his bedsores. She ignores the decades of clutter piled around the rented hospital bed, leaving just a narrow path to walk through. She pulls off the bandages and inspects him, squinting through her glasses. “Looking better,” she says.

I’ve always wished my sister could be more like me. Suddenly I wonder if I should be more like her.

K.A.
Redwood City, California

Lani wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:48 pm I remember him! I think I first met him on Dr. Conspiracy's website. Happy to hear he's now a Dem

Here Are the Winners for the 2021 National Book Awards
BY HILLEL ITALIE/AP
NOVEMBER 17, 2021 9:41 PM EST
NEW YORK — Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a surreal meta-narrative about an author’s promotional tour and his haunted past and present, has won the National Book Award for fiction — a plot twist Mott did not imagine for himself.

Hell of a Book is a satirical take on a Black writer’s adventures on the road for a promotional tour — Mott himself had his share of experiences while talking up such previous works as his debut novel The Returned — and a stark and disorienting tale of racial violence and identity, drawing on recent headlines and the author’s childhood.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Mon Nov 22, 2021 10:51 am I am completing the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny.

Foggy wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 2:35 pm Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey, the ninth (and final) book in The Expanse novels. The first 8 were excellent, so I expect no less. I think it (the series) was made into a big-production Tee Vee series (on Amazon Prime?), of which I have seen zero episodes. I prefer books, but that's just me, cantankerous ol' coot.

Dr. Caligari wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 7:39 pm I just finished The Hollow Places, a very good (and very creepy) horror novel by T. Kingfisher. I'm now starting A Confederacy of Dunces, which I've always meant to read and never got around to.

Maybenaut wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 10:38 pm Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victor

By Ben MacIntyre.


OMG, it’s so good. A movie is coming out this year.

Kriselda Gray wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 6:31 pm ... it looks like the main storyline is built on a trope I'm not very fond of.

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Protagonist character gets pulled into the schemes of a former lover who they're still attached to because of a kid

Foggy wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 1:16 pm In the books, I feel like that was a long time ago. In the storyline of Leviathan Falls, that's so long ago (more than 20 years) it has no real impact; in other words, if you didn't remember it had happened, you wouldn't miss any of the meaning of anything in this book. I think that was all in just one of the books.

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And the lady in question isn't exactly THE protagonist, she's one of several. James Holden is, I would say, a little more the protagonist of the story, because he's the one who makes the important decisions, sometimes when she thinks he's making bad choices. She's smarter, but he's the captain. He's a very human captain, prone to mistakes.

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Fair point on THE protagonist, but she is *A* protagonist From the previews of season 5 that I've seen and the little I've heard about it, this is the main storyline for the season and may be a departure from the book. The ex has returned and is a very bad guy who has their kid working for him, so Mom has to try to get close to them so she can rescue the kid. As much as I tend to dislike that kind of story because certain parts are usually fairly predictable, I keep feeling like I should give it a chance. If the 4th season story had been at the same level as the first three, I wouldn't even hesitate. But after that disappointment, I'm just kind of wary.

The ex has returned and is a very bad guy who has their kid working for him, so Mom has to try to get close to them so she can rescue the kid.

Lost library of literary treasures saved for UK after charity raises £15m
The Honresfield library, including manuscripts by the Brontës, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, had been at risk of falling into private hands

Alison Flood
Thu 16 Dec 2021 13.07 GMT

It is an unprecedented treasure trove of the UK’s literary heritage, from a letter in which Jane Austen anticipates the end of a love affair, to a handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems that was once believed lost. Now the Honresfield library has been saved for the nation after a charity raised more than £15m in just five months to acquire it.

Half the amount was donated by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, with a further £4m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). The remainder was raised through donations from organisations including the TS Eliot and the Foyle foundations, another £2.5m from museums and libraries, and “thousands” of individual donations, which raised just under £150,000 from people around the world.

A rare handwritten manuscript of Emily’s poems, mentioned in the preface to Wuthering Heights, with pencil corrections by Charlotte.
A rare handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, mentioned in the preface to Wuthering Heights, with pencil corrections by Charlotte. Photograph: The Honresfield library
Assembled towards the end of the 19th century by the Rochdale mill owner William Law, the Honresfeld library has been almost entirely inaccessible for the last 80 years. It was put up for auction at Sotheby’s earlier this year, to the horror of literary institutions up and down the country, who feared that precious manuscripts by the Brontës, Austen, Walter Scott and Robert Burns could fall into private hands. Led by the charity Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), an “unprecedented” consortium of libraries and museums came together to save the collection – which includes more than 500 manuscripts, first editions and letters – for the nation. The vendors and Sotheby’s agreed to postpone the sale while the funds were raised.



https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... raises-15m