Banned Books Giveaway Hop!

I just recently did a giveaway hop from this blog, but when I saw that this week's hop would be promoting banned books, I thought, "hmm.  How cool!"

Then I really started researching banned books.  And I really started getting p*d off.  I had NO idea that so many books that shaped my childhood and teen years had been banned, whether here in the States or around the world.

A List of Once-or-Now -Banned-OR-Challenged Somewhere Books I love:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
• The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney (and it's subsequent follow-ups)
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Georgia Nicholson
• The Goosebumps Series by R.L. Stine
• Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
• A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
• Scary Stories series by Alan Schwartz
• How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell

I'm sure there are more.  Our world is rife with censorship and hate.  I can only hope that one day we will move into a golden future where we are all equal, all forward-thinking, and all appreciative of art in any of its varied forms.

My books often have themes and situations which would certainly have put me on banned lists in the past.  Paganism, goddesses, witches, sex, and murder.  I am happy to live in a country where we don't have "banned" books, though there are sects of people consistently challenging those books we adore.

In honor of Banned Books Week I'm going to give away a copy of one of my favorite all-time books (that I didn't put in the list above because it is cut from a different cloth).  If you HAVE read this book, please consider entering anyway.  You can always gift it to a friend.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

"Wild nights are my glory," the unearthly stranger told them. "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I'll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."

A tesseract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg's father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.

The hop is closed :)