PSA: Uprise Books Project
Just in time for Banned Books Week! Please repost and spread the word wherever you can: The Uprise Book Project. The goal: To promote literacy for underprivileged and low-income kids by providing banned and challenged books to them, free of charge. They're currently raising money on Kickstarter to hire someone to design the website. In case this sounds familiar, they got a signal boost this morning on Facebook and Twitter from a local fellow by the name of Chuck Palahniuk. Then the Twitter post got reposted by a *lot* of people, including a not-so-local fellow named Neil Gaiman.
(And to think I just found out about it Tuesday evening -- the day or the day after it launched -- from my kid brother, a library circulation supervisor who may eventually get his MLS, although he's already been working there for about twenty years. Yeah, he started there when he was in high school. I have to confess that I probably wouldn't have pledged as much if he hadn't said the magic words: "I'm on the board of directors.")
So. Yeah. Celebrate Banned Books Week by spreading the word and sending some money their way! And, of course, digging out your copies of and getting lost in _Carrie_, _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_, _The Catcher in the Rye_, _Lord of the Flies_, the entire Harry Potter series, _American Psycho_, _Dante's Inferno_, pretty much anything by Vonnegut, _A Wrinkle in Time_, and, in short, anything else that makes you *think*.