Sneaky Censorship

Banned books are not a new thing.  The list is ever changing and based on opinions of those who deem themselves to be the judge and jury of what we should or should not be reading.   I read what I want to read, no one will tell me otherwise.   Thank goodness I live in the United States where I have that sort of freedom to state such a thing and put it into action.   

This morning, however, I heard on the news something far more disturbing than another banned book.  It was censorship taking things up a notch.   From my understanding the publishers of the Ronald Dahl books , Puffn Books, a division of Penguin random house, has started changing passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race.         

Now Augustus Gloop in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”  is no longer “enormously fat” he is just “enormous” .    The cloud-men in “James and the Giant Peach” are now  “cloud people”.     Those are just two examples.   While it may seem like it is not a huge deal, changing these things in lieu of cultural sensitivity as we view it currently, I have I gigantic problem with it.    My problem is that they have gone in and changed this author’s words, his creation. 

They deemed it unfit for today’s standards so they just fixed it?   A writer’s words is a form of art,   would a museum take it upon themselves to paint clothes over the paintings of Botticelli or Courbet because they would be considered pornography by today’s standards?   Of course not, those are classic pieces of art.   A book is the same and I am just furious to know this is being done and morbidly curious how often it has been done without anyone’s knowledge.

Now I will be forced to hunt down copies of books published before the year of the “Cultural Sensitivity Brigade.”