bookshelves of doom

Jane Eyre... the board book.

It's an upcoming title in the BabyLit series, which I only just learned about through Polly Hanson's Pinterest.

No kids in my house, but I might need these books anyway.

Yes, yes, zombies are getting old.

And vampires are even worse.

But I still do very much want to want to read The New Deadwardians:

Simply because I fall over laughing every time I read the title.

Herge and Spielberg and Tintin and racism.

From The Atlantic:

Still, it's worth noting that the effort to avoid racism does have its own pitfalls. Herge's world was often built on racial stereotypes, but that meant that he had to have lots of exotic folks around. Jews, blacks, Indians, and Asians all featured as bit players and sometimes central figures in Herge's work. In Spielberg's film, on the other hand, they are simply erased, like the blacks in Tintin's American editions.

Still haven't seen it.

I'm always a few years behind.

Link-o-rama.

• Stuck in the Middle: 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age has been challenged at the Buckfield Junior-Senior High School library in Buckfield, Maine.
• Did you know that New Zealand has a list of 1304 banned books? And that selling one of them could result in being "fined up to $200,000 or jailed for up to 10 years"? Me, either. Lots more info (including a database of banned titles) at New Zealand's Office of Film & Literature Classification (the person in charge of the office is titled the "Chief Censor"!) and their Department of Internal Affairs.
• Judy Blume interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation.
• Sam's Club pulled The Brick Bible from shelves, hilariously, because it was a little too faithful to the original source material. Heh. Anyway, obviously, it all came about when some people made the faulty assumption that Legos = Children's Book, and then complained about it when they discovered the sex and violence and whatnot. There also seems to also be some confusion about whether or not Sam's Club (it seems to be a they-said/they-said situation) had a hand in a dozen or so of the original images from the author's website being excised from the print version to begin with...
• Iraqi students: Not so interested in American books.
• Bhagavad Gita as It Is is facing a ban in Russia.
• Once again, the ladies aren't appearing on the Best of Lists.

Link-o-rama.

• Tintin is a "Catholic hero". I... had no idea.
• Joyce Sweeney's Shadow has been challenged in a Boca Raton middle school.
• Ed Champion has an excellent round-up of the ongoing Q.R. Markham plagiarism scandal—AND he's reading the book and posting all of the instances he can find. It's SHOCKINGLY egregious.
• Librarian facing disciplinary slapfest after including the Bible in a "Books We'd Like to Burn" promotion. The whole thing is especially laughable as he's already losing his job due to cutbacks. Well, morbidly laughable.
• Nina LaCour's Hold Still challenged—and removed from the school library, despite the lack of any, you know, formal investigation—in Missouri's Blue Springs School District.
  
  ALSO. Unimpressed with the lack of speed on the school's part, the challengers hooked up with their pastor and combed through the rest of the extra-credit reading list that Hold Still was on, and have deemed nine of the fifteen other titles inappropriate. 
  
  The pastor is quoted as saying it is his "job to be a watchdog and help" in deciding what books are appropriate, as well as this:

"Are you aware of the vulgarity? Are you aware of the acts of sex, incest and homosexuality? All of these. Are you aware of these?"

So... WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

The ACLU is already involved.

I don't think that the scare quotes are necessary.

A headline at the Telegraph: Tintin banned from children's shelves over 'racism' fears

After all, I don't think there's really an argument about whether or not Tintin in the Congo is racist or not -- the argument is about how to deal with it.

Art Spiegelman on Maus.

There's a write-up at the NYT about MetaMaus, which is being released for the 25th anniversary of Maus' publication.

This was my favorite bit:

Twenty-five years after its original publication, “Maus” continues to provoke. Mr. Spiegelman recalls an incident in Germany in 1987, when a reporter barked at him, “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?”

The author responded, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”

It's too bad that he took issue with it getting a YA award—he felt that winning the award suggested it was "immature"—but, as we've seen recently, there are plenty of people who don't differentiate between children's, middle grade, and young adult, so maybe that's what was going on with that.