This week we began our first one -- a tragic story of racial tension, rape, murder, abuse, growth and redemption. As recently as a few months ago it was challenged by a parent in Tennessee who contends that its use of racial slurs encourages "racial hatred, racial division, racial separation, and promotes white supremacy."

No matter that it is widely considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, or that the admirable characters are the ones who eschew racial hatred at great personal cost, or that the evildoers who embrace racial hatred receive well-deserved justice.

Today is the beginning of the 25th annual Banned Book Week, the American Library Association's celebration of the freedom to read. More than a book a day is challenged or banned in U.S. high schools and public libraries, some, like "To Kill a Mockingbird," for use of racially charged language, but most because of their depictions of sexuality or the use of profanity.

Regardless of the specific charge against a book, the underlying issue is almost always an offense to the reader's sense of cultural propriety. Although challengers often cite immorality in a piece of fiction as a reason for objecting to it, most books which come under fire are, in fact, intensely moral. Traditional values are not questioned at all in even the most troubling adolescent fiction. Good almost always trumps evil; characters endure trials, but they learn from them. What are questioned -- and often for legitimate reasons -- are the traditions and mores of a particular culture.Great books -- the ones that transcend time and place -- deal with the broader concerns of human nature. Human nature doesn't change. We all experience the universal emotions of happiness and sorrow, joy and grief, trust and betrayal. People have always searched for meaning, have needed love and acceptance and community, have wrestled with determining justice and mercy.

We still read, thousands of years after it was written, "The Odyssey," because we recognize ourselves in Telemachus as he struggles to establish his credentials as an adult. We know what Penelope is feeling when she cries herself to sleep with longing for her missing husband. We wince when Odysseus faces the dilemma of Scylla or Charybdis, not because we have ever made such a journey or understand all the nuances of ancient Greek life, but because we see ourselves in the story. The cultural references may mystify us, but we understand perfectly the humanity of the characters.

Books that slight this emphasis on the universals of human experience and focus instead on cultural peculiarities soon become dated. Human nature may not change, but cultures inevitably do. Despite the Bill O'Reillys trying to divide us into warring camps, cultures have always vibrated between the comfort of the familiar and the lure of the new.

Our human nature reminds us that we are connected to each other, but our culture serves to narrow our sights into a more manageable tribe or group. It offers us a blueprint for survival and a clan to help ensure it -- but eventually economic, social, technological and scientific forces make the rules and ideas of any culture obsolete. As much as we might desire our traditions to remain the same, change always wins in the end. If it didn't, we would still live in caves, painting the walls and cursing the dark.

People who challenge books worry not only that their culture is slipping beyond their control, but they believe that books can have a pernicious effect on readers. As a writer and as a teacher, I certainly believe in the power of words to hurt or heal, but I also believe in the principle of free speech and the ability of people in a democracy to make informed decisions for themselves.

That's why I support Banned Book Week and will continue putting banned and challenged books on my reading list. Perhaps because their own lives -- their own youth culture -- is in constant flux, teenagers accept change more gracefully and seem less threatened than their parents by the cultural dissonance in books. For example, when I mentioned to my students that "To Kill a Mockingbird" was often challenged or banned, they were baffled.

"I can see why racial slurs are upsetting," one student said, "but that's how those characters thought and talked. It wouldn't ring true if they didn't. And besides that, the people who complained missed the point of the book completely."

Students who have the freedom to read and who have been encouraged to think critically don't miss the point. They can see through the temporal issues of culture to the eternal concerns of what it means to be human, and they discover their own humanity in the words of people close and far, known and unusual.

This is cache, read story here