Follow Friday and TGIF!

Friday's meme day in the blogosphere, and I love getting to visit with new and old people every week to see their answers to the questions posed.

TGIF is a weekly feature created and hosted by GReads!

This week at Books and Threads
Sunday: In My Mailbox 
Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Want to Reread
Waiting on Wednesday: Audition and Bunheads 

Review: Slayers by C.J. Hill
Review: All You Desire by Kirsten Miller
Review: Ten Things We Did (And Probably Shouldn't Have) by Sarah Mlynowski
Review: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

This Friday's Question:

Banned Books: How do you feel about the censorship of the freedom to read? Do you think the education system needs to be more strict on what children are exposed to in books?

I absolutely do not believe in censorship or book banning of any kind.  I believe that children - and adults - pick up and read books that they need to read.  If they're not mature enough to understand the book, they'll totally miss the 'objectionable' content.  Not to mention that telling any curious child he can't read a book will just inflame his interest, and he'll find a way to read it.

With the enormous amount of information flying at all of us every second now, I think it's really important for children to learn how to filter out the unimportant stuff and differentiate between what's legitimate or not.  Books are probably the easiest way for parents to teach children about this since the parent can review the book first and help the child understand it.  Books are also a way to open conversations about tough topics - bullying, death, stress, friendships, boyfriends, life, morals, and more. 

So yeah, books are important to me (uh, yeah, I work at a library), and the freedom to read is even more important. Which is why I talked my boss into letting me put up a Banned Books Week display last Sunday.  You know what pleased me most?  The majority of the recently challenged YA books were already checked out.  Heck yeah.

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Follow My Book Blog Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read to feature a different blogger every week and let all of us stop by to say hi!

This week's featured blogger is Starcrossed!

Q. What book that hasn't been turned into a movie (yet) would you most like to see make it to the big screen, and who would you like cast as your favorite character? 

I don't know!  I'm always so afraid of the movie or TV show not measuring up to my love of the book so I obsess and worry over it way too much.  Like the proposed Vampire Academy movie scares me because I freaking adore those books, and what if Rose isn't perfect and badass and Dimitri isn't a freaking hot and giant Russian and ugh, they'll cut my favourite plot threads and probably focus solely on the love story instead of the awesome Moroi politics and Rose and Lissa's friendship and argh...

Clearly I have issues.  That being said, I think I like books to movies more if the books being made into movies aren't my absolute favourites.  Like I loved the Game of Thrones show and Master and Commander a few years back with Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany.  Though I also really enjoyed the recent Tomorrow When the War Began movie, and I utterly adore that series.  I'd be really excited if  Peter Jackson (who owns the rights. I'm not picking him randomly) ever makes Naomi Novik's Temeraire books into a movie because dragons during the Napoleonic Wars would be so amazing on the big screen.

So what I'm trying to say here is...I mostly pass?

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Book Blogger Hop is a weekly meme hosted by Crazy for Books that allows us to connect with and support other book bloggers who love books just as much as we do!

In honor of Banned Books Week, what is your favorite “banned or frequently challenged book”?

Such a hard question!

For the recently banned/challenged books, I'm going to say Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and (of course) Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

As far as the older books or classics go, I'd have to choose Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Even if mentioning the last one makes me feel like a pretentious jackass.