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" Only a couple months after a school district in Texas suspended seven books from its curriculum, works including Sherman Alexie&amp;#039;s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Toni Morrison&amp;#039;s Song of Solomon, and Hermann Hesse&amp;#039;s Siddhartha, it has sent parental permission slips home for six books that otherwise cannot be read in class. The new list is an even better assortment of books, I would argue, than the old one, containing straight-up classics like Aldous Huxley&amp;#039;s Brave New World, Bram Stoker&amp;#039;s Dracula, and Oscar Wilde&amp;#039;s The Picture of Dorian Gray. You could do worse than spend the winter reading just the books that the Highland Park Independent School District has put on its list of books that require permission. The purpose of the permission slips, according to school principal Walter Kelly, is to find out how many parents will &amp;quot;opt out&amp;quot; of their children reading those books in a grade-11 Advanced Placement English class. The school board is not inventing this desire to suppress literature. It is coming from the parents, who are worried that... What? What are they worried about? That their children will start believing in mirrors that age while they stay young? That instead of growing up to be fine upstanding Americans they will turn out to be blood-sucking vampires? That their innate drive to employment and heterosexual union will be terminally wrecked by a vision of a dystopian future of drugged and promiscuous social order? But it&amp;#039;s not all bad news for the students of Highland Park. There is good news, too. They get to participate in one of life&amp;#039;s great joys: reading the material that the authorities don&amp;#039;t want you to read. This isn&amp;#039;t just a pleasure; it&amp;#039;s practically a responsibility. When I was a kid they pulled Hitler&amp;#039;s Mein Kampf from the library. I immediately when out and bought a copy. This is a life rule that every self-respecting teenager should follow: If someone tells you you can&amp;#039;t read something, go out and read it. Right away. No matter what it is.  And the books that the Highland Park school district have rendered illicit are such a joy to read, so much better than Mein Kampf, which, when all is said and done, is pretty boring and predictable. In addition to Brave New World, Dracula, and The Picture of Dorian Gray\u2014all of which are not only undisputed classics but also superb page-turners\u2014there is The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. All in all, it&amp;#039;s a well-rounded list combining the complex and classic with the contemporary and topical. The balance is terrific. It&amp;#039;s better than any given annual prize shortlist. It is amazing to think that there are people in this world so secure in their lives, and so satisfied with the situation of their children, that their foremost worry is that the kids might happen to be influenced by The Picture of Dorian Gray. And yet the parents of Highland Park are far from alone. Every year brings a measure of schools that ban or otherwise censor books, or try to. It&amp;#039;s an American hobby\u2014&amp;quot;challenging&amp;quot; books, trying to get schools to restrict books that offend in some way. And since the better the book, the more provocative and hence more offensive it tends to be, the more likely it is that American schools are trying to stop the best books from getting into the hands of children. There is something perfectly fitting in the fact that the most challenged book in America today is also the greatest and most American of American novels: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The first book to be banned was the Bible. Needless to say, requiring permission for students to study books is un-American to the core. It is one of the founding principles of the New World: Here, you get to read whatever you want. Freely. Without other people&amp;#039;s permission. Fortunately, the forces of liberty always win in these cases. A North Carolina school board&amp;#039;s attempt to ban Ralph Ellison&amp;#039;s Invisible Man was overturned last year after it faced much ridicule and a local bookstore giveaway. And if any of the students of Highland Park, Texas, want to read any of these wonderful books and they are opted out, they just have to go out and get them. Which I sincerely hope they do. What else are books for than to find out what people don&amp;#039;t want you to know? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a31367/books-suspended-highland-park-texas/>