Every so often I’ll pick up a book that I think is just wonderful. It has fantastic characters, it’s funny, the mystery is well written, and then I turn the page, and somebody is doing something they really should not be doing, and I blush and feel guilty, even though I didn’t know it was there. Dang! (That’s how a Mormon swears.) Why did the author have to mess up a great story with that one paragraph?
Well, what do you do in a case like that? We recently talked about building a library in your home. You want to be careful what you include in that library, because you never know when Johnny or Susie might want to grab one of Mommy or Daddy’s books off the shelf. You’d really like to keep the book because it was so good, but that one scene . . .
Here is the beauty of owning your own books. Go to the cupboard (you know, the one that’s way up high so little Timmy can’t reach it) and get out your black marker. A wave of that magic wand and presto! The offensive scene, sentence or word is covered up and you now have a PG-rated book that you wouldn’t mind letting your fourteen-year-old read.
Every so often, you might decide that a whole page needs to be blacked out. Why not just rip it out? Get a ruler, lay it inside the crease, and tear along the hard edge of the ruler. If you just grab the page and rip, you might weaken the binding and cause the pages on either side to fall out, but by leaving just a quarter inch or so of paper still attached and holding its place in the binding, you should keep the overall integrity of the book.
This is another reason why buying books for a penny on Amazon is such a cool thing. When you’ve only spend a penny for a book, you don’t have one shred of money-hoarding guilt over pulling out a page. You can custom-make your book to your specifications. Hey, maybe if you don’t like how it ends, you could stick a Post-it note on the back page telling what you think should have happened!
Related Blog:
The Prevalance and Effects of Sex in the Media
