Confessions of a Habitual Re-Reader

I'm a habitual re-reader, a fact pointed out by my boyfriend when I was on my third cycle through my book collection in 2 years. It was an extraordinary moment when I realized that I had dropped a few rungs on the literary ladder from voracious reader to avid re-reader. This realization spawned a rebirth in my personal reading habits. My first step was to box all of the books in my collection up and store them in the closet. If I can't get to them easily, I won't read them over and over again; then I started setting annual reading goals for myself, to encourage reading an assortment of books. The goal I set for myself in 2006 was to read 10 books from the banned/challenged list that I had never read before. Pickings were a little slim, since so many books I had already read or could be categorized as "sex education materials," but I managed to find 10. Through the course of the year, I selected 10 great books that I was so happy to have read:

Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger - I realize that it is a little odd that I had never read this book before-since so many schools still have it on their required reading lists. I chose this one to read first because of that, and because several friends recommended it so highly. I personally thought that the story was wonderful, and I had a very hard time understanding why the book has been removed from so many libraries/curriculums.

We All Fall Down, by Robert Corimer - I did think that this story was mildly unnerving, in that a girl begins to date a boy who not only vandalized her home; he was, in part, responsible for her little sister being in a coma. The side story of the boy who watched the family and saw the vandalism was actually more disturbing to me than the main story line. I could see some logic in banning this particular book, but only because it seems to be geared towards young teenagers, and many of them aren't really ready to handle the subject matter well.