BookEnds

Next week is Banned Books week. Sponsored by library, publishing and journalism organizations, this week celebrates, among other concepts, the First Amendment, the right to know, the right to free and open access and the importance of access to unpopular or unorthodox viewpoints.

In 2008, the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom received reports of  513 challenged books. Check out the Top ten.

For more information check out http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/ which provides a map of book challenges and the ALA site.

Malt Whitman or Li-Berry Pie?

As the summer melts blissfully into the thick, sultry humidity of August, the library can become a delicious oasis of cool; the air-conditioned stacks of arid-smelling books and chilled silence of the hushed reading rooms are a delight on the hottest, muggiest of days. What could possibly be more delicious, more satisfying and better suited to cut the cloying heat of a sticky mid-afternoon than the delectably bookish pleasure of library-themed ice cream?

That’s right — Ben & Jerry’s is considering the launch of a library-themed ice cream flavor, spurred by the campaign of New Jersey librarian Andy Woodworth. Woodworth wanted to bring attention to the current plight of the public library, suffering beneath the burden of slashed budgets, so he embarked on this crusade to combine the academic with the gastronomic. His Facebook group to support the idea has already garnered over 4,000 eager followers and more are sure to follow in the trail of such a delicious idea. After all, if Jerry Garcia, Dave Matthews and Stephen Colbert can inspire their own flavors, why not the library?

A few of flavor ideas being bandied around already sound scrumptious:

- “Gooey Decimal System = Dark fudge alphabet letters with caramel swirls in hazelnut ice cream.”

- “Cookie Bookie = a combination of cookie bits!”

- “Li-Berry Pie = Lime sherbet mixed with raspberry sauce and pie crust crumbles (cinnamon sugar, butter, piecrust).”

- “Rocky Read = vanilla with chocolate covered nuts chocolate chunks and raisins.”

- “Sh-sh-sh-Sherbet! = Key Lime or a Chocolate/Vanilla combination.”

- “Malt Whitman” = malt ice cream with chocolate alphabet letters and two caramel and fudge swirls.”

The Facebook group includes a link where interested bookworms and ice cream afincianados alike can suggest a flavor right to Ben & Jerry’s. Personally, I’d vote for “Gooey Decimal System” but does anyone have any other mouth-watering suggestions?

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And, in other food-related news, I found this post in the New Yorker book blog that just made me smile — the team at The Book Bench “decided it would make sense to put on our Zagat hats and reduce great works of fiction to mediocre restaurants.” Suggestions include “The Sound and the Curry”, “Rabbits at Rest Free-Range BBQ”, “War and Pizza”, “Grapes of Wrath” winebar and “Animal Farm”, a gastro-pub where the sausage “occasionally talks back.” Dinner, anyone? 

The Ferguson Library dedication in 1982

It took me five months, but I finally finished “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” by Alex Haley. The thick novel has been sitting on a bookshelf for longer than it should, one of the many “to-dos” that I don’t always have time to do. I was too young to read it when it was published in 1976, though I recall watching parts of the ensuing (and highly successful) miniseries, which aired a year later.

The 500-plus page book is a narrative account of one of Haley’s descendants, Kunta Kinte, who was captured near his home in the Gambia in Africa in the mid-1700s and brought to America where he was sold into slavery. The story tracks every successive generation up to the life of the late author, who spent about 12 years in the 1960s and ‘70s, traveling across multiple continents, visiting numerous libraries and institutions and poring over many documents to authenticate the stories that had been passed down through the generations.

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