Next Saturday marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, held this year from September 29 to October 6, 2007.

What is Banned Books Week all about?

Banned Books Week (BBW) celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.—ALA (Source)

Read more about Banned Books Week on the ALA website. There is also a similar event that happens in Canada: Freedom to Read Week will be celebrated from February 24 to March 1, 2008.

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To celebrate Banned Books Week, I’d like to announce a giveway contest here on the Raincoast blog! The prize: a set of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore trilogy: GIFTS, VOICES, and POWERS, which was just published last month.

These books are great for teen readers who love fantasy and magic. POWERS recently received a glowing review from Sarah Ellis in the Globe and Mail:

“POWERS is rich with action, with battles, escapes, strategy and skulduggery, but it has a still, quiet place at its heart, a place of moral complexity. [. . . ] There is no chicken soup in Ursula Le Guin, no answers you can print on a T- shirt. Instead, she provides a convincing and fully realized narrative that gives the teen reader hope that the huge tasks of growing up, of finding work, love, your people and your self, can be successfully accomplished.”

--Sarah Ellis, Globe and Mail

I’m giving these books away in connection with Banned Books Week because the second book in the series, VOICES, is set in a time and place where reading and writing are considered to be acts punishable by death. It is believed that there is one place where that the last few undestroyed books are hidden, but it is seething with demons…

Enter the Banned Books Week contest by leaving a comment below. Tell us what Banned Books Week means to you… Are you planning to celebrate by reading a controversial book? If so, which one? What would you do if all books were banned? Do you think people have the right to speak out against books they object to?

The contest closes October 4th and is open to Canadian residents only. Good luck!