This Book Is Banned
by Raj Haldar
Banned? Perfect. Now they'll definitely read it.
For you if
you've been told you can't read something and you want to know why
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Raj Haldar's picture book opens with a premise: these books have been banned. Each turn of the page reveals something ridiculous — a book about nothing, a book about everything, your very own book — banned, banned, banned. The joke lands the way the best jokes do: in the middle of laughing, kids realize the question underneath is real. What does it mean that something can be taken away? Who decides what you're allowed to read? Haldar doesn't answer — he just lets the absurdity sit there, which is exactly the right move for a four-year-old asking why.
Where This Book Lives
Part of a Reading Journey
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress(2002)
dir. Dai Sijie
Banned books, secret readings, and one crush.
Two city students sent to a remote mountain village for Maoist "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution discover a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels — and use them to woo the local tailor's granddaughter. Adapted from Dai Sijie's own novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.
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A Lebanese boy living on the street sues his parents for having him, and the film unwinds backward through the neglect and poverty that brought him there.
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