Freedom to Read

Join the Freedom to Read Book Club! On the first Monday of each month, the club will meet in the library at 6 PM to discuss a book that has been challenged, look into the reasons around the attempted ban, and discuss the book as a work. Sponsored by our friends at Phoenix Books Rutland!

Leading the discussion will be Bill Wiles, retired adjunct professor at Vermont State University (Castleton), who taught a course on banned books for several years. The first title will be "Daddy's Roommate," by Michael Willhoite. The publisher's description reads, "This book discusses homosexuality through the eyes of a young boy whose dad is gay."

Originally published in 1990, Daddy's Roommate has a special place in Rutland Free Library's history. A woman complained to the media about the book, seeking to have it removed from the general collection and be placed in a restricted place where patrons would have to ask to see it. June Osowski, the children's librarian, and Paula Baker, the director, stood their ground through an impassioned public debate.

The upshot was that the book stayed in the general collection, and in 1998 the library, Baker, and several trustees received a national award for intellectual freedom from the American Library Association, "For their successful defense of Daddy’s Roommate in their library’s collection and their successful mobilization of the community in support of the library’s intellectual freedom policies."

Please join us beginning at 6 PM on Monday, Oct. 5, in the Fox Room for what is bound to be an engaging conversation! 

November's book will be the classic novel of dystopian book-burning, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. That meeting will again be at the library on the first Monday of the month: Monday, Nov. 2 at 6 PM.

Since the late 1940s, Ray Bradbury has been revered for his works of science fiction and fantasy. With more than five million copies in print, Fahrenheit 451 -- originally published in 1953 -- remains his most acclaimed work.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by a totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch." Today, when libraries and schools in this country and all over the world are still "burning" certain books, Fahrenheit 451 remains a brilliantly readable and suspenseful work of even greater impact and timeliness.