Banned books and speaking tips

A couple of things caught my eye as I wandered the Net this morning:

Public speaking tips from Mother Tongue Annoyances. These are all good, but I especially like the 'wiggle your toes' thing. I have another speaking tip that I got from a friend of mine, an ex-Marine. He says Hoo-ya in that Marine way before making a public appearance. It works for him. When I tried it once, it worked for me, but then I forgot the next time and my speech sucked.

Banned book week.
This I picked up at No Quarters via Nashville is Talking. The American Library Association has a whole resource area on this. Including a list of the Top 100 most 'challenged' books. I haven't read a whole bunch of these, and a lot of them are children's books. But some interesting ones from the list are:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Beloved by Toni Morrison

And just about every book that Judy Blume ever wrote, and not just the 'dirty' ones like Wifey and Forever. One thing I'll say for some of the above books is that they are upsetting. Beloved depressed me so much I couldn't stand to look at the book after I finished reading it.

They also have links to 'modern' book burnings. Including one where the book-burners in question were denied a permit by the local fire department, so they decided to have a 'book cutting' instead. Tee-hee.

A lot the current ire is directed toward the Harry Potter series. I haven't read any of these and don't intend to. I saw the first film last Christmas and I thought it was stupid and derrivative. So there.

I often see people reading Harry Potter books in the Underground. With the most recent one I had a great idea. I knew that a character died, so I hunted around for the spoiler on the Internet. I know who it is. I thought I could wander around the Underground looking for those in the early pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Brain Prince and threaten to tell them who dies unless they give me £10, or maybe £5 if they negotiate.