With Start of Banned Books Week Comes a Burning Confession : Local stores will mark the occasion with readings and displays of targeted works.

As Banned Books Week approaches, this is the time to come clean: I once burned a book. Literally. It was five years ago and what I did has haunted me ever since. It was a very badly written novel, vicious and graphic with no discernible message. I’m always filling boxes with books to be given to libraries and used-book fund-raisers. I kept putting that book into the give-away box and yanking it out again. On a fateful night sitting in front of a fire, I did it. Watched it burn and wept.

Well, Banned Books Week begins Saturday and many bookstores will be observing the event with readings and displays of books challenged and banned.

Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres,” winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was banned at Lynden High School in Lynden, Wash., because it was judged to have “no literary value” to the community.

Here in Ventura County, battles were waged in Fillmore over the assignment of Richard Wright’s classic “Native Son.” Some parents in Ojai sought removal of a high school literature text because of a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Moorpark residents wanted Theodore Taylor’s book, “The Cay,” removed from a school reading list because of its stereotypical portrayal of African Americans.

Among the thousands of books certain groups want and sometimes succeed in getting removed from schools and libraries are “Macbeth,” “The Color Purple,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss and the Bible.

And although I chose to destroy my copy of That Novel, I join all rational people in insisting that no book be publicly banned. We can attack the content of a hateful book, but we must defend its right to sit on the shelf. The Ventura Bookstore will offer for a $1 donation, “I Read Banned Books” buttons and bumper stickers supplied by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Barnes & Noble’s “Read In” is scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday.

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Ojai author Margaret Jones will sign “Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline” tonight at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 4360 E. Main St., Ventura.

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Jean Craighead George, naturalist, former member of the White House press corps and the acclaimed author of more than 40 books, will sign “Julie,” the sequel to “Julie of the Wolves,” at 10 a.m. Friday in Adventures for Kids, 3457 Telegraph Road, Ventura.

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Mystery readers and mystery writers, pencil in Susan Dunlap, who will sign “High Fall” at 2:30 p.m. Friday, and Dianne Pugh, author of “Slow Squeeze,” scheduled at 1 p.m. Saturday at Mysteries to Die For, 2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks.

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Michele M. Serros, who read her poetry to audiences of more than 25,000 while on a national rock ‘n’ roll tour for Lollapalooza ‘94, will read from and autograph “Chicana Falsa & Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard” at 6 p.m. Saturday in the Ventura Bookstore, 522 E. Main St. The former Oxnard resident is a student at UCLA and the first-prize winner of the 1992 Santa Monica College Latino Literary Contest.