Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It's "Banned Books Week," so throw out that lascivious copy of the Bible under your desk and read something that isn't smutty! In this sermon, we at "The Gods Are Bored" will offer you safe and secure suggestions for eliminating banned books from your life. As you know, reading banned books has caused many of the social ills plaguing humankind. We have to do something about it, pronto.

You know what great, safe, and improving literature is regularly overlooked? Instruction manuals! Don't believe me? Go find the manual that came with your IPod or your microwave. Better yet, read that fascinating sheet that came with your Ikea book case. You won't find swear words, sexual situations, or violent content in there. And it just gets better, because instructional manuals fold up so nice and cozy -- you won't need the book case you just bought. Take it back!

I'm a school teacher, so it's very important for me to be aware of all these banned books. Such evil works as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men can be found all over my school! But worry not, dear reader. I'm tossing that smut and replacing it with helpful and instructional literature. This week I made copies of my Verizon monthly statement for my entire class. Of course I blacked out HBO first, because we all know what kind of filth runs on HBO.

You might think cookbooks are safe. And I agree, so long as they don't have any recipes that are high in fat, salt, or sugar. The trouble is that a smart student, when given a Weight Watchers cookbook, will figure out how to re-introduce the salt, sugar, and fat into an otherwise slimmed-down recipe. So be warned. Cookbooks are not acceptable.

I'll tell you something else that should be banned. Used book sales. There's no oversight in these things! Kids can wander around and just choose whatever they want to read. Chances are that Mom is over looking at the tennis or yoga paperbacks. She won't even notice her susceptible youngster poking a curious eyeball into Leaves of Grass.

The very best way to protect innocent children from banned books is to not teach them to read in the first place. How many times have I had to remind you people that the entire Captain Underpants series is banned, banned, banned! And it's written for third graders. You can't have third graders reading about a character named Professor Pippy P. Poopypants! This will warp them for life. Better not to read at all than to be tempted to read a banned book.

Further banning: the bestseller list. Have you read  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or any of its sequels? Horrific! (I actually mean it. Turned my stomach.) And yet ... and yet ... that book is in my school's library! Heck, let's ban bestsellers and the library. Purity of mind, purity of mind.

I have been trying to decide what core curriculum I should teach my sophomores next, after they're through with the Verizon bill. Aha! Here's my high school yearbook! (*Anne blacks out the ribald comments by her classmates*) What a relief! My students will love this.

This is at least the tenth post I've written about banned books. Lately I've been wondering why I get all riled up about them. I hardly ever see anyone reading a book anymore, unless it's a student who's been told they have to read. So we stop teaching students to read, and then no one will read, and there will be no reason to ban books.

I say, give everyone a Droid and burn all the books. A modest proposal.

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Dr. Who is on in just three minutes, and it's my experience that if you miss the opening credits you won't have a clue what's happening in the rest of the show.

But how can we let Banned Books Week go past without nodding in its general direction?

Have you ever noticed that some of the most popular and widely-read books actually ought to be banned?

I jest, of course. One does wonder, however, what the world would be like without certain exclusionary religious tracts.

I don't think any book should be banned. I would have trouble taking a book from one of my students if it was titled A Beginner's Guide to Undetectable Incendiary Devices. Hey, the kid's reading! Reading, I tell you ... and a science book at that!

The whole banned book thing has been on my mind recently because our school has a daily free-read where students spend 15 minutes minimum reading a "personal choice" book. This year the school administration issued a new directive: all "personal choice" books must be from the school. Students cannot bring books from home.

I guess you can imagine why this might be. Give an adolescent kid a couple of bucks, send him/her to WalMart, and he/she's likely to pick up some salacious, sexy, smutty tome that celebrates the lavish lifestyle of playas in the hood. Bring that to school, everyone's gonna want to read it, yo.

So. Let them read it.

We have not yet come to an era when reading isn't important, but we have come to an era where it's not something that some people want to do. In my opinion, anything that these people decide to read should not be banned for content, language, sexually explicit situations, or poor moral values. If it's words on a page, and someone is interested in reading it, I say --- here's a bookmark!

Now I'm missing Dr. Who. But I'm not finished with this topic for the year.

I recently had to pry a book out of the hands of one of my students and turn it over to the vice principal. It was about a ruthless gangsta who decided that nothing was gonna get in the way of his getting his woman back, even though she was with another dude and even had a kid with that dude. So the gangsta flashes some bling at the girl, and she goes running back, but her new bro's also a billionaire, so she can't decide. For awhile she hooks up with both of them, but in the end her baby daddy fixes it so that the gangsta gets shot. And the girl doesn't really care, because it's all about the money.

Trash. Utter trash!

Except that this is the plot of The Great Gatsby, which I will be teaching in Honors class this year.

You'll never see me ban a book. The most troublesome book I've ever read is the Bible, and even that I would say we should keep ... with some judicious edits.