Dibs

An Illinois school-board member has just lost her bid to have nine popular books banned from the required-reading list in the state’s second-largest district. Lesley Pinney, the mother of a local high-school grad, sought to ban Beloved by Toni Morrison, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. According to the Chicago Tribune, Pinney explained her plan by saying, “If the media are bombarding our children with explicit sexual images and graphic violence and prolific profanity, can’t a school relent from that?” She said that she opposed books containing vulgar language, brutal imagery or depictions of sexual situations inappropriate for students. She specified masturbation references in the Chbosky book and a bestiality scene in Beloved. (Pollan’s book explores how various plants, including potatoes, reproduce.) But she also admitted not having actually read all the books on her ban-list. At a school-board meeting last week, Pinney’s proposal was voted down.