banned books

[cellio]

Seen in many journals, most recently dragontdc. This is a list of the most-often banned books (time period unknown to me). The convention is to use formatting to indicate which you've read all or part of and which others you want to read, but I'm going to sort the list instead.

Read all the way through:
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [An ironic entry on this list...]
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck [As a child; I don't remember it being subversive or otherwise objectionable...]
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Read part of:
#5 Arabian Nights
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke [Can't remember if I've read it all, mainly because I can't recall how long it is.]
#69 The Talmud [Ok, there are people who've read the whole thing, but...]
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein [That's the one with the notebooks of Lazarus Long, right? I've read those. :-) ]

Want to read (all or part) someday:
#4 The Koran
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The rest:
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman [never heard of it]
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo [Does seeing the musical count? :-)]
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway [I really can't stand Hemingway...]
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell [Saw the movie...]
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess [Saw the movie]
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

While I'm a little surprised at the number of items on that last list, I must admit that I have basically no curiosity about them.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck [As a child; I don't remember it being subversive or otherwise objectionable...]

I recall it being horribly, emotionally-scarringly bloody. But that was about it.

Flowers for Algernon? Banned? What, it causes people to think or something?

[cellio]

I recall it being horribly, emotionally-scarringly bloody. But that was about it.

Oh, ok. That could well be (I don't remember). I was reading other stuff as a child that people don't approve of now (and that my parents probably wouldn't have approved of if they'd paid closer attention), so I guess I had a decent capacity for seeing such things as "just a story".

Flowers for Algernon? Banned? What, it causes people to think or something?

There are several entries on this list that I don't really get. I wonder if someone with more agenda than critical-thinking ability decided that it portrays the mentally handicapped in a bad light or something. Dunno.

[geekosaur]

#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein [That's the one with the notebooks of Lazarus Long, right? I've read those. :-) ]

No, that's Time Enough for Love. Stranger is about the kid raised by Martians, and probably gets banned because of the "free-love" cult that grew up around him (and, at least in part, inspired the real-world ones in the '60s...). (The other possible reason would be the rather obvious Christian symbolism of his death.)

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Correct. As an aside, I believe that Lazarus Long was introduced in the novel (novella?) "Methuselah's Children."

[ealdthryth.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'm not sure where your list originated. One of the lists I have seen in a journal came from the ALA (American Library Association) website. It was the 100 most frequently challenged books 1990-2000. The Challenged and Banned Books page makes interesting reading because it explains the difference between a challenge and a banning as well as how the list is tabulated. Most of the challenged books are in school libraries. So, if you look at books challenged in any given year, you can tell what students were being asked to read. :-)

Every year during Banned Book Week in the fall, I read some of the books on the list for the previous year.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Of the ones you haven't read, I really like #30. The movie version is good, but not a candle to the nuances of the book.

(There are others on there I think are excellent, too, but To Kill a Mockingbird impresses me every time.)

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll get lots of recommendations on the last list, and there are many I could plug, but I'll note just one. "Les Miserables" is my single favorite novel. :-)