Last week brought the second annual Ski for Literacy event to town. Next week, from Feb. 26 to March 3, it’s Freedom to Read Week. The Whistler Public Library is marking Freedom to Read Week with a display of some of the books that have been challenged or banned in public and school libraries. The list of banned and challenged books is long enough to fill a library by itself. Among the authors whose works have been challenged are John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Munsch, James Joyce, Margaret Atwood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Thirty-seven of the 50 books most frequently challenged in schools and public libraries in the United States between 1990 and 1992 can be found at the Whistler Public Library, including Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
