Apparently, last week was Banned Books awareness week. Banning books is sad. But, even sadder still is the fact that I learned about Banned Books week after listening to a Harry Potter podcast. Yes, I'm a complete dork, but where else am I going to turn to find out all the juicy details about the new movie coming out next month? Anyway, the Potter discussion directed me to this website which lists the 100 most challenged books from 1990 to 2000, on which the Harry Potter series is number 7. To clarify, because a book is challenged doesn't mean that it's actually banned, it just means that someone has formally asked for it to be banned. The list is derived from 6,364 reported challenges over the ten-year span. While I was reading through the list most of the books weren't very surprising, eg. something called Daddy's Roomate (#2) and Sex by Madonna (#19), but others were very surprising, such as Scary Stories (#1) and The Catcher in the Rye (#13). However, the most surprising of all of them (to me at least) was Where's Waldo? (#88). It'a a picture book for goodness sake! What could possibly be the reasoning behind banning it? I'm utterly befuddled.