This woman wants to stop any libraries from owning "The Book of Bunny Suicides."
The title alone - “The Book of Bunny Suicides” - was enough to catch Taffey Anderson’s attention.
Then the Halsey woman saw the picture on the cover: cartoon bunny ears sticking out of a giant toaster. That was enough for her to pull the book from her 13-year-old son’s backpack and take a closer look.
What she saw convinced her to never give the book back to the Central Linn School District, and to do her best to make sure it’s never replaced.
“I saw poor bunnies going through meat grinders; people, like, throwing them in there and they’re getting shot out. People in Nazi helmets, and there’s a bunny, and they’re shooting him,” she said.
“It’s not a kid book. I feel it’s not even an adult book. It’s not OK.”
The 2003 book of black-humor cartoon drawings, by British author Andy Riley, was available to students in the library of Central Linn High School. Anderson’s son told her he checked it out because friends said it was funny.
“It is a comic book, but that’s not funny. Not at all,” Anderson said. “I don’t care if your kid is 16, 17, 18. It’s wrong.”
Anderson said she contacted the high school and spoke to Principal Julie Knoedler, who told her how to follow the district’s book-challenge policy and encouraged her to bring the book back for review.
Anderson plans to fill out the forms, but she’s not taking a chance on returning the book. Once the review is over, regardless of the decision, she plans to burn it.
“They’re not getting this book back,” she said. And should the library replace it, “I’ll have somebody else check it out and I’ll keep that one. I’m just disgusted by the whole ordeal.”
Jean Townes, library consultant for the school district, said library books are ordered in batches, usually based on recommendations from established academic sites.
The “Bunny Suicides” book was on a young-adult reader list recommended by the American Library Association, she said, and she knows other school libraries in Oregon also have purchased it. She declined to comment further.
Online searches of card catalogs in Albany and Corvallis schools did not turn it up. Librarians in the Lebanon, Sweet Home and Scio districts said it was not a part of their collections.
Albany Librarian Ed Gallagher said the sequel to the book, “Return of the Bunny Suicides,” which has similar drawings, had been on the shelves of the adult section. It’s gone now - someone checked out the book and never brought it back, he said - but he has heard no complaints about it.
Scott Keeney, the children’s librarian for the Albany Public Library, said the book wasn’t appropriate for the children’s section but was fine on the adult shelf.
“I looked at a few of the cartoons and they were funny. Kind of mature, a little twisted and black. Some youth love that, some don’t,” he said.
Keeney compared Riley’s drawings to the 1988 Simon Bond cartoon book, “101 Uses for a Dead Cat,” which he said some people would probably find equally obnoxious.
“Every family is different, and the range of community values in fiction, in movies, nonfiction, is so broad it’s astonishing,” he said. “Some families, you’d be astonished at what they allow or disallow on all sides of the open-information-for-children spectrum.”
Knoedler, Central Linn’s principal, said she had not personally seen the book.
“The way she describes it, it sounds horrible,” she said. “But my idea of horrible and somebody’s idea of horrible who has been a reluctant reader, who we’re just trying to encourage to read, and what his family (might think), are different.”
The library buys hundreds of books, she said, and tries to appeal to all kinds of readers.
“I wish that we could run every single book that’s recommended on these lists before a parent committee before it’s purchased,” she added. “But we have to rely on what is considered, in the school library industry, to be reliable sources.”
To complete the review process, the Andersons need to bring the book back for the committee to see, Knoedler said. If they refuse, the committee will have to purchase a book, at $13, which will be charged to the family. If Anderson doesn’t pay, her son will not be allowed to check out any more books.
“That’s really unfortunate, because he’s obviously a kid who’s interested in checking things out from the library,” Knoedler said. “We won’t put it back on the shelf. We’ll put it out of circulation until the review is done.”
http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2008/10/19/news/top_story/1aaa03_bunnies.txt Judge for yourself:
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/Bunny_Suicide_Comic_Pics_226_2007.php ~~~
I think this woman is a nutcase.