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Greetings!
It's that time of year again - it's time to celebrate Banned Books! Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.
The 2018 theme, “Banning Books Silences Stories,” is a reminder that everyone needs to speak out against the tide of censorship. Many of the most frequently banned or challenged titles of 2017 were books about young people dealing with issues around race, violence, and gender issues. We'd like to see more of these stories told and not hidden.
We have decided to share with you some of our favorite Banned Books in this month's newsletter. Some may come as a surprise to you, but we genuinely hope that this opens the door to more discussions on what we can do as "book people" to ensure that we never silence the stories of others or lose our right to read.
Remember, if you’ve lost yours,
we are your local bookstore!
All of us at AIB
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Join us at Northland College
for the release of an updated edition of
Peter Annin's Great Lakes Water Wars
What: Reading & Discussion with William Kent Krueger of his updated edition, The Great Lakes Water Wars
When:Friday, September 28th at 4pm
Where: Northland College, Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute
Join Director of the Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation and Director of Environmental Communication Peter Annin for a pre-release event for the updated edition of The Great Lakes Water Wars. Peter invites attendees to learn more about current issues surrounding water policies and the future of fresh water.
Peter Annin writes a fast-paced account of the people and stories behind these upcoming battles. Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past-and future-of this unique resource.
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New York Times Bestselling Author,
Leif Enger is back after almost 10 years with
Virgil Wander
What: Reading & Discussion with Leif Enger
When:Thursday, November 8th at 6pm
Where: Kickapoo Coffee in Bayfield (across the street from bookstore)
The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander follows the inhabitants of a Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart.
Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a swift, full journey into the heart and heartache of an often overlooked American Upper Midwest by a “formidably gifted” (Chicago Tribune) master storyteller.
Join us at Kickapoo Coffee in Bayfield to hear all about Leif Enger's latest novel, and meet the author. We will have books available for purchase, and the cafe will have coffee and snacks available for purchase.
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What we're reading...
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
BANNED many times throughout the United States since 1967 for sex, violence, foul language, and religion.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
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Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
#1 BANNED book of 2017 for profanity and sexual references.
It should be noted that this outstanding novel has continued to be challenged throughout the country, most recently, in New London, MN in May of 2017. The challenge did not succeed, but it was a close 3-2 vote.
This is the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written.
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