Banned

[catscradle]

Got this meme from plaidder

In this list of banned books, bold the ones you've read and italicize the ones you've read part of, and then you're supposed to convince other people to read some.



#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#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
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#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
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#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
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#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
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#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
#69 The Talmud
#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
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#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
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#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
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#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
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I'm a little frightened that Aristotle's Metaphysics and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason were banned. I suppose if you put it up against radical fundamentalism it'd fail the test, but otherwise sheesh!

I find it interesting that I read many of these books at an all girls Catholic high school, while many of my friends attending public school had them banned. Books like A Separate Peace and Catcher in the Rye. It's frightening to see how much power religious factions have on public schools.

Books on this list I'm going to try to get to this summer: Steppenwolf and As I Lay Dying.

Comments

[alighiera.livejournal.com]

I remember that when I was still at school we had an American teaching assistant for English class. She was shocked that our textbook contained excerpts of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Why the Caged Bird Sings and Huckleberry Finn, books she considered to be terrible because they describe horrible conditions nobody should have to read about. It's obviously easier to ban books than to confront dark times in your own history.

And good luck with Steppenwolf. It's one of the few books I could never get through... Tell me what you think when you read it!

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

Was your teaching assistant caucasian? It seems a bit suspect to me she'd be so shocked at books describing the black American experience. This isn't to say she was necessarily racist, but rather ignorant of the importance of knowing the oppressive and often violent reality of existance for minority groups in the US (or anywhere else for that matter).

And I'll let you know about Steppenwolf. :)

[alighiera.livejournal.com]

The teaching assistant was caucasian. I wouldn't call her racist, rather the opposite - frantically anti-racist. We always got bad marks whenever we used "blacks" instead of "African Americans". Which is tricky to remember when the first is perfectly acceptable and pc in German... She was very careful not to say anything that might be considered racist.

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

The African-American usage is also tricky here, as there are many blacks not of African descent - such as the Jamacians and other islanders - who aren't very keen on the blanket term used for them. But cripes, I mean in Germany I doubt blacks there want to be called African Americans. I just wonder if this woman had the capacity to think ourside of her little American box. What's PC here isn't necessarily PC in the rest of the world.

[wiebke.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that I read many of these books at an all girls Catholic high school, while many of my friends attending public school had them banned.

On the other hand, I went to a public high school and we read a sh*tload of books that, looking back, I realize were filled with sex, gay people, violence, very twisted stuff. In one of my classes we read a book by Nadine Gordimer with a scene of a guy having a sex with woman having her period and there being blood on his **** afterward. A lot of the stuff I was assigned to read in AP English or the art & philosophy oriented English class I took was pretty darn frank, politically oriented, etc.

Of course I think I went to a pretty exceptional school.

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it really depends on your location in terms of how open minded the school boards are in what they let kids read. I thank God my parents sent me to private schools, as the public schools in our area were governed by a religious faction of dimwits. They banned A Separate Peace because they felt that the secret society the students created in the book would teach the kids how to make their own satanic cult. Never mind that there was no satanic cult in the book. Never mind that this has never happened in the history of secondary schooling. Never mind that they missed the point of the book completely. But just in the next county, the public schools were reading it and all sorts of books banned in my county.