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"Hunger Games" tops "Most Challenged" list
Published: 4/12/2012 4:56 PM
Last Modified: 4/12/2012 4:56 PM


The three books of "The Hunger Games" trilogy. Are you up for a challenge?

Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” trilogies currently top the best-seller lists, the film version of the first novel in the series has been the No. 1 film at the box office since its release, even the soundtrack album of the film has topped the charts.

Collins’ oeuvre is popular with one other group – people who wish to see books they deem inappropriate removed from schools and libraries.

The American Library Association recently released its list of the “Most Challenged Books” for 2011. “The Hunger Games” was No. 3, because some consider it anti-ethnic and anti-family, that it portrays “occult/satanic” ideas, contains “offensive language” and “violence,” and displays “insensitivity.”

This is not a new honor of Collins; the first book in the trilogy, “The Hunger Games,” was the No. 5 “Most Challenged” title of 2010. This year’s list includes the second and third books in the series, “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay.”

Exactly what is a “challenged” book? According to the ALA: “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

In an interview last year with the Associated Press, around about the time the 2010 list was released, Collins acknowledged that her books – set in a dystopian future, and centered around a spectacle that involves teenagers engaged in a bizarre fight to the death – are not for everyone.

Few books are – outside of something like “Good Night, Moon” or “Pat the Bunny.”

I’ve not read “The Hunger Games,” but I know a number of people who have. They have found them to be compelling, even when they thought the situations – and the implications of those situations – were profoundly disturbing.

These readers were all adults, however. I’ve not talked with any teenaged readers – the original audience for “The Hunger Games” – about what they thought of the books. World reporter Sarah Plummer’s recent column about watching the film of “The Hunger Games” surrounded by teenagers makes me think that most of them thought the books to be lively, edgy adventure stories, with all the violence of most popular video games.

This year’s list of “Most Challenged Books” was compiled from 326 such challenges the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom receives from libraries, schools and media outlets, about efforts to ban certain books in U.S. Communities.

And it includes a pair of perennial titles – Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. What this year’s list doesn’t include is the book that has been the No. 1 “Most Challenged Book” for four of the last five years: “And Tango Makes Three,” a picture book about a pair of male penguins who form a couple and hatch an offspring.

The 2011 “Most Challenged Books,” along with the reasons for those challenges, are:
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



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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