14 of us met for an interesting evening with Jilly resplendent in a tee shirt large enough to hold a long list of “Books they tried to Ban”. She bought this in America, where they have had a Banned Books Week since 1982 to challenge censorship, organised by the American Library Association; we joined in with our own BBW in 2016. Maybe there’ll be more publicity about it in 2018.
Our member Jilly had visited the Newseum in Washington DC earlier this year
We started off with a list of questions to consider in twos. Then looked at two lists of banned or challenged books, one from the Newseum in Washington, one from our Daily Telegraph. Jilly will be distributing her paperwork for this meeting because the list of famous, prizewinning books they’ve tried to ban is huge. We only had time to discuss the reasons for some of them, but she has more info. We ended up with a Quiz. There was loads to discuss, including self censorship.