BANNED: GREEN EGGS AND HAM.

As you may have noticed it's Banned Book Week and I'm delighted to be joining Book Journey's Sheila (our hostess with the mostest) along with lots of other bloggers who are also participating in Jump On The Banned Wagon.

To join in the event of seven days of books, reviews, and many giveaways be sure to stop by HERE at Sheila's site.

Running this year from the 30th of September through to the 6th of October, BBW started in America in 1982 as a response to the sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in American schools and libraries since when more than 11,300 books have been challenged, the top 10 of last year (according to the official BBW site) being ......

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence
4. My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit
8. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
   Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
    Reasons: offensive language; racism

Anyway, onto just one of the many, many books to be banned at some point in time.

Please be aware that this is not my usual book review and though it is not overly adult in content it may be moreso than many previous posts.

GREEN EGGS AND HAM by DR SEUSS. 

Picked not least of all because it's a book I, along with the now grown-up Niece #1 and nephew, have read and enjoyed countless number of times (without any of us actually having picked up on any sexual innuendo) I also think its a perfect example of just how silly the censoring of books can be.

One of the most popular writers of children's books, since 1936 when he developed the idea for his first book Dr Seuss has charmed his way into the lives of four generations of children and parents alike - in the process of doing so helping many kids learn to read. Hard to believe that his 1965 novel, Green Eggs and Ham was banned (albeit temporarily) in the People's Republic of China as well as more recently in California.

A book about a character called about Sam-I-Am who makes it his mission in life to get a somewhat grouchy unnamed individual to eat a plate of green eggs and ham, it was banned between 1965 up until the authors death in 1991 in the People's Republic of China because of its 'portrayal of early Marxism and in California because of it containing what was deemed as homosexual innuendo and seduction.

Yes, that's right ...... homosexual innuendo and seduction  - was I reading the same book?

For goodness sake, I think its fair to say that most of us stopped sniggering (if indeed we ever did) about a sausage looking like a penis a long, long time ago and yet it would seem that, far from giggling like primary school aged school boys, (if what we read is to be believed) someone in California deemed it fit to ban this book because .......

• Sam tries to convince his friend to 'eat' the green eggs and ham - the ham of course representing a sausage, the sausage of course being a phallic symbol.
• Several of the lines (Would you, could you, on a boat'/would you, could you, with a goat) were said to suggest 'sexual locations'. 

Oh please!

Read purely innocently by hundreds, thousands, millions(?) of children and adults alike across the globe I can't begin to wonder what kind of mindset these people had to come up with the notion that Sam, in trying to convince his friend to eat the ham (aka the 'sausage, aka the penis), was encouraging his friend to engage in certain sexual acts and that 'with a goat' obviously put the thought of sex with animals into the head of the books mainly pre-school-aged readers.

And, what's more ......

Would I be the only one who had concerns about the pre-school child (the age range at which the book is aimed) who, having heard the story, drew the conclusion that far from being a story about a young boy trying to get his friend to try a new foodstuff this was a story full of sexual connotations?

Not that Green Eggs And Ham with its secret messages that corrupt the minds of innocents is the only one of Dr Seuss's books to be banned - The Lorax (anti big business), The Sneetches (issues surrounding racial equality)  How The Grinch Stole Christmas (issues surrounding consumerism), Horton Hears A Who (a story about an obviously gay elephant) have all also been banned at one time or another

Sources: Bannedbooksweek.org, Wikipedia, OPPapers.com, mudmap.

PS For those of you wondering where my Media Monday post is, worry not, I shall be posting it tomorrow.