In Honor of the ALA's Banned Books week, I'm doing a Banned book of the day this week on Facebook

[TheMightyFavog]

So, Which books should I do next? So Far, I've covered Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Slainger's The Catcher In the Rye, and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

What should I highlight Tomorrow?

[uncommon]

1. Funny how the banned books are some of the best books.

Says a lot about the people who wish they could control us.

[jobycom]

14. Why would anyone ban a crappy book? That's like telling a kid not to listen to CSPAN.

They weren't planning to until you told them not to, anyway. :rofl:

[HopeHoops]

2. Anything with "Dick and Jane" - it just sounds naughty.

:evilgrin:

[TZ]

3. Judy Bloom was someone I REALLY enjoyed as an adolescent

So you know what I picked. I really liked "Are you there God, its me Margaret" as well.

[Tobin S.]

4. I read that book, too, after hearing some girls talk about it when I was a kid

I was looking for girly information, but I think I had more questions after I read the book than before. :)

[Chan790]

5. Well, I voted for Henry Miller but...

I'd really like to see you do the diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Not only were they filthy but *shock* *horror* public admission that as a woman she enjoyed sex and that she'd been having dirty thoughts from the time she starting writing her diaries at age 11 were profoundly scandalous for that day. It was one thing for Miller to be a pervert and literary pornographer, it was another thing entirely for Nin, as an upper-class educated female, to be his peer in that and openly-adulterous lover. Also, she was a damned fine writer and literary academic.

Any discussion of banned books would be incomplete without mention of Anaïs Nin.

[tigereye]

6. my God, Anne Frank? I had no idea that one was banned. What possible

reason could their be for banning a book about a brave young girl and her family hiding from the Nazis? Sheesh.


On edit, those lists contain many books that are classics which I have read and loved. Very, very sad for folks to be so frightened of books that champion everything (good or challenging) that makes us human.

[TheMightyFavog]

8. From the ALA's summary on banned and challenged books for this year:

"Challenged at the Culpeper County, Va. public school (2010) by a parent requesting that her daughter not be required to read the book aloud. Initially, it was reported that officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank’s diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, due to the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes. The director of instruction announced the edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Frank’s death in a concentration camp, will not
be used in the future despite the fact the school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints. The remarks set off a hailstorm of criticism online and brought international attention to the 7,600-student school system in rural Virginia. The superintendent said, however, that the book will remain a part of the English classes, although it may be taught at a different grade level. Source: Mar.
2010, pp. 57–58; May 2010, p. 107."

[Ishoutandscream2]

9. Amazing, isn't it?

Had another mom at my school work to get "To Kill a Mockingbird" banned. I still don't understand her reasoning behind it. She was loony as hell, and luckily she was mocked for her stupidity.

[tigereye]

11. so sad -we just re-read Mockingbird for my book group and the 50th anniv.

It was as good as I remember when I was a preteen. I really can't imagine people who try to ban books. It's just incredible to me. Thoughts can't really threaten or harm, generally, and they enhance life in amazing ways. :wtf:

[Ishoutandscream2]

15. Love that book. About 20 years ago, I taught it in my honor's

7th grade reading class. A mom of one of my former pupils says to this day her daughter still carries a beat up paperback in her purse.

[tigereye]

20. it's just as good as I remember it - although folks in my book group thought

it was more of an allegory than the strong characterizations of other Southern small town writings. Nonetheless, it just sticks in your head. I want to see the movie again.

[Pool Hall Ace]

7. "Nickled and Dimed" was recently recommended to me

so I chose that one.

But count me as another who didn't know that Anne Frank's diary was banned! :crazy:

[Curmudgeoness]

10. A list of the top 100 books banned or challenged. OMG.

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/index.cfm

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp, by John Irving
38. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia, by Willa Cather
52. Howards End, by E.M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz, by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
68. Light in August, by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
86. Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians, by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles
94. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
99. Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

[tigereye]

12. Winnie the Pooh? Wth?

:rofl:

To the Lighthouse? Although I see a lot of Woolf on there. Sigh. Just incredible. So many wonderful books- if many of these 100 had been banned in my youth, I would have had nothing to do!

[jobycom]

18. It wasn't. The poster misread the description. That's Radcliff'e Top 100 Novels of the 20th century.

On the web site at the link, 46 of the books are in bold, and the description says those were challenged or banned. Winnie the Pooh is not in bold.

Although a high number of the top 30 are.

[jobycom]

17. Those aren't all banned. That's a reading list, and on the site, the banned books are in bold.

That's the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. It's a great reading guide. You can't see it in the copy/paste here, but 46 of the books have been highlighted, and those are the ones ALA says were challenged or banned. Winnie the Pooh was not one of them. :) Follow the link.

[tigereye]

19. but ya know what- someone, somewhere, probably found a reason to ban it!

:crazy:

[Sabriel]

13. I vote for the gay penguins

Who doesn't love gay penguins?

[jobycom]

16. Tropic of Cancer is my fave. Why would anyone ban that book?

Well, okay, graphic anal sex, prostitution, infidelity, profanity, misogynistic language and imagery, graphic bodily functions... You just have to skim those parts, and you're left with three pages of the most profound literature ever. :rofl:

My kid's high school last year gave her a list of banned books and told her to do a report on one of them. She had to get a permission slip to do it. She came home and said "Dad, I forged your signature on a permission slip, in case anyone asks."