Banned Books Week: On a mission from God

So I was just blogging about BookCrossing.com, a sort of grassroots book-liberation cult that my parents joined and that describes itself this way:

You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever more!

The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing...

Read a good book (you already know how to do that)

Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book

Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

Sounds easy, right? Well it is. It's also a fascinating exercise in fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature. Oh, and we should mention, it's absolutely free and absolutely private, too.

I looked at the email newsletter that my mother forwarded from BookCrossing.com and noticed it had an alert about this week's Sunday Sunset Mission, apparently a weekly event for the BookCrossing folks:

This week's Sunday Sunset Mission is a natural tie-in to Banned Books Week. The choice of books was the easy part - you can start with the list of the 100 Most-Challenged Books at http://www.ala.org/bbooks. The release location was harder to decide - I hope you agree that your local lawmakers are the ideal target audience for SSM5:

ïRELEASE ZONE:
On the steps of your local city hall (city government office)

ïRELEASE METHOD:
A well-labeled book, ideally from the 100 Most-Challenged list, left on or near the steps, and protected from the elements as needed. You might get creative by "hanging" the book from a tree limb, or "jailing" it inside a small cage, etc. Use your imagination, and try to take pictures!

ïRELEASE TIME: Sunday, September 21st, at Sunset wherever you live.

Hmm...City Hall is right down the street. And it is almost sunset...

So I quickly joined the cult and grabbed a frequently banned book from my bookshelf:

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. I'm actually glad to be rid of it, because it's a very dangerous book that, along with The Origin of Species, promotes the heretical idea that humans and animals did not just spontaneously come into existence about 10,000 years ago at the direction of God, but instead "evolved" over a period of "time" by a process of "natural selection."