Censorship Week: My Friend Amy
Welcome to Bookalicious and Censorship week. We all know I am a huge advocate for censoring in your own home and leaving others to do what they wish in their own. Instead of giving you post after post of my own opinion, I wanted to bring in some other awesome bloggers to give us their take on censorship and what it means to them personally and their thoughts on what it means to us as a society. Humans through the ages have always banned, censored, rallied against, and protested anything that fell beyond their comfort zones. Whether that zone is in place due to religion, upbringing, or personal morals I have never understood the need to force others to your mentality. As bloggers we have the platform to be anti-censorship. To be a flagship of open content and doing and saying on our own blogs what we see fit. We must outwardly oppose censorship of any piece of literature, even if we are censoring it in our own homes. What if we are the next to be censored? Freedom of journalistic integrity and blogging taken away. What then?
Here is what Amy from My Friend Amy has to say:
One of the things I most love about reading is that it is a low risk way to confront my prejudices. Often, going into a book, I have no idea that some of my ideas about life or people might be challenged. I might not realize that I’ll be asked to slip into the mind of someone very different from myself and feel the things they feel as they experience a variety of situations I may never experience. I really believe that reading fiction allows me to become a more sympathetic person.
This is one of the reasons I cannot tolerate the idea of censorship. Granted, I have always read what I wanted to read. It’s a freedom I do not take for granted, especially as I’m learning more and more about book banning. Censorship is a form of control that should not be tolerated in our society. Censorship is when one person or groups of people try to shape the information intake and thus the way another group of people thinks. This usually benefits a majority rules type mindset. This is particularly cruel, because books are often where we first discover we are truly not alone.
Are books a cause for fear? Well yes. Because reading by its very nature encourages thought, sympathy, empathy, imagination, and the changing of one’s mind. If you are seeking a world uniform in thought, a world that is grey, where injustice goes unnoticed, and everyone is exactly the same then books are the most terrifying objects there are. Books contain the the story of us, of all of us, humans working out our different situations through artistry, trying to make sense of the messy, holy, mystery of life. But no book is a simple object and no reading experience invites a uniform response. Each individual responds and reacts to what they find in the pages of a book in a way that is unique to them.
Living in this world is hard. There is no reason to make it harder by trying to control the way we think, by barring books that express a different worldview from ours from the shelves, by robbing ourselves of the chance to feel a little more human compassion for one another, to feel angry by injustice, to feel empowered to realize we are not alone. Can’t we put aside our fear and instead open our ears and start talking to one another instead?
Top 5 reasons to blog about books
Today the top 5 is going to be related to a blog I read over at The Story Siren blog. I think it is important before you open a book blog, that no matter how glamorous it seems there is a lot of hard work involved also. Me I am behind at least 3 reviews and 6 books to read just at this moment in time. This has to be done for your deep love of reading and pseudo existent marketing skills.
- The first reason to start a book blog should be your complete and utter love of books, whether it is all books or a niche such as YA or Fantasy. Finding your niche and designing your blog around this is important. My personal niche is YA, Fantasy, and True Stories. These things fascinate me and I absolutely love reading these stories.
- Be honest, don’t bash books but find constructive ways to say why you didn’t exactly like them also say why, why the book didn’t engage you in the way you thought. If you want to blog the main question people want answered is why. Why did this book rock or why was it not so good>
- Publishers are fantastic, another good reason to start a blog. I started mine and worked at it a couple of months before I started the twitter and Myspace and Facebook and all the social marketing aspects of having a blog. The main thing people need to see is content and that the content is relevant to what the blog is about. Don’t use this space to blog about your adorable dog, or those rascally kids of yours. It’s really not needed, focus on books and putting up great reviews the incoming hits will increase along with publishers who like your style and want you to review their books. Do not under any circumstance accept books you will not or do not want to read and review or books that do not fit the niche and style of your blog., instead let the publisher know in an email back what your blog is about and what type of books you look for.
- The community of bloggers, in my links section that is new here because I am still sorting everything out, are some really good bloggers whose styles vary but are all good reviewers. Look to these people for advice and just to see what they have going on at the moment. The community of book bloggers is not an easy nut to crack, they want to see that you are serious and know your stuff, and are making a genuine effort. They are very helpful and if you feel stuck on anything most likely one of these lovely ladies will help you out.
- Lastly, make sure you can commit, if you can blogging about books can be such a rewarding experience. Introduce you to book fans and bloggers around the world with similar interests. There can be awesome conversation and some good advice and news out there, do not be discouraged if things don’t work out immediately, internet things come slowly and the more you learn the better your blog will be in every aspect.
That being said happy blogging, I am new to the book world myself just a few months but have a lot of internet blogging and marketing experience from other areas of expertise and used these sites to handle the initial push for this blog. If you have other properties use them to your advantage when possible. If you have any questions or comments or if I missed anything or need to elaborate more on a point please let me know.
