Banned Books
Here is the list of the top 110 banned books (of all time), according to the American Libraries Association. Not being raised in either Europe or America, I am not au fait with some of the cultural and political complexities of book banning in the US. I know better now, but it used to amaze me how straight-laced the Americans were back in the Victorian and Edwardian ages, especially compared to their European counterparts. This banned books list is a long one and contains some really strange and unexpected titles. The religious ones, fine. Huck Finn? Yeah, we know about the potentially explosive racism angle. The salacious and the scandalous, perfectly understandable. But Little House on the Prairie was banned?
The exercise: Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of).
#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 (A childhood favourite. I can see why it was banned back in the days, but this is a GREAT piece of children's literature)
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (Assigned book for English Literature. A tough slog, but good stuff)
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (I was too young to appreciate this when I read it the first time. The second time I read it was after seeing bits of the horrendous film version with Demi Moore. I had to re-read the book to cleanse my mind, and found it wonderfully rewarding.)
#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 (Assigned book for Eng. Lit. But I would have read it anyway)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (Book? Musical? Movie? I love the musical and know most of the lyrics by heart. I cannot say the same for the book, but the book is by far a greater work of art. It is a stupendous achievement.)
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker(The original and the best horror novel. So creepy and atmospheric and truly bone-chillingly terrifying.)
#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 EdwardGibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (My favourite Hardy novel after the Mayor of Casterbridge, which was another Eng Lit assigned book. )
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce (I was in University and surrounded by flyers proclaiming numerous Blooms Day events. I beat a path to the library and spent a month with Ulysses. This is not a book that I will read for fun, but I recognise what a monumental achievement it is.)
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell (Eng Lit assigned book. This was an easy read.)
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I owned a battered copy that my brother had recovered from a stack of disposed books at his school library. It had neither front or back cover. I re-read the book a few hundred times as a teenager. I own a nicer copy now, with a proper cover, and still re-read it often. Outside of the Austen oevre, this is probably one of my favourite novels, for its atmospheric writing and understanding of the growing pains .)
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (Not sure why, but I couldn't really get into Steinbeck. I had this book on loan for 3 months, and could never get to the end of it.)
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence (This book is NOT smut. I think it is a beautifully written character study, with a romantic sub-plot.)
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Well, I had to read this because it was the cool thing to do back in university. The strange thing is that I don't actually remember much of it. It is the ultimate dystopia novel, the grandaddy of the genre, but it hasn't left an impression on me. Strange.)
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchel (I read this as an impressionable teenager in an all-girls school. This was the swooning 1000 page romance that my schoolmates and I cried over. Except that the heroine was a bit of a brat. And the romance wasn't really that romantic since everyone was lying to everyone else. But we were 15, what did we know?)
#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
#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 (I really liked this book. It is so much better than the movie, which was a decent cinematic experience but doesn't pack the punch of the written version. Very touching, very real.)
#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 (This is a work of genious. Yes, the subject matter is uncomfortable, and illegal, in many places. But it is so beautifully written and so wonderfully constructed. This is a book that challenges and rewards at the same time. Just brilliant.)
#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 (I kept reading about how Emile Zola was supposed to have written such scandalous novels. Well, I found both Nana and Therese Raquin rather mild. Conceptually dangerous, but executed with such taste and class that I could not imagine being outraged by it.)
#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
Tally: 30 that I have read in their entirety. 16 that I have read in parts. Not bad. Not illicit-materials- smuggler calibre, but not bad.
The exercise: Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of).
#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 (A childhood favourite. I can see why it was banned back in the days, but this is a GREAT piece of children's literature)
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (Assigned book for English Literature. A tough slog, but good stuff)
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (I was too young to appreciate this when I read it the first time. The second time I read it was after seeing bits of the horrendous film version with Demi Moore. I had to re-read the book to cleanse my mind, and found it wonderfully rewarding.)
#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 (Assigned book for Eng. Lit. But I would have read it anyway)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (Book? Musical? Movie? I love the musical and know most of the lyrics by heart. I cannot say the same for the book, but the book is by far a greater work of art. It is a stupendous achievement.)
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker(The original and the best horror novel. So creepy and atmospheric and truly bone-chillingly terrifying.)
#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 EdwardGibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (My favourite Hardy novel after the Mayor of Casterbridge, which was another Eng Lit assigned book. )
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce (I was in University and surrounded by flyers proclaiming numerous Blooms Day events. I beat a path to the library and spent a month with Ulysses. This is not a book that I will read for fun, but I recognise what a monumental achievement it is.)
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell (Eng Lit assigned book. This was an easy read.)
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I owned a battered copy that my brother had recovered from a stack of disposed books at his school library. It had neither front or back cover. I re-read the book a few hundred times as a teenager. I own a nicer copy now, with a proper cover, and still re-read it often. Outside of the Austen oevre, this is probably one of my favourite novels, for its atmospheric writing and understanding of the growing pains .)
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (Not sure why, but I couldn't really get into Steinbeck. I had this book on loan for 3 months, and could never get to the end of it.)
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence (This book is NOT smut. I think it is a beautifully written character study, with a romantic sub-plot.)
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Well, I had to read this because it was the cool thing to do back in university. The strange thing is that I don't actually remember much of it. It is the ultimate dystopia novel, the grandaddy of the genre, but it hasn't left an impression on me. Strange.)
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchel (I read this as an impressionable teenager in an all-girls school. This was the swooning 1000 page romance that my schoolmates and I cried over. Except that the heroine was a bit of a brat. And the romance wasn't really that romantic since everyone was lying to everyone else. But we were 15, what did we know?)
#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
#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 (I really liked this book. It is so much better than the movie, which was a decent cinematic experience but doesn't pack the punch of the written version. Very touching, very real.)
#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 (This is a work of genious. Yes, the subject matter is uncomfortable, and illegal, in many places. But it is so beautifully written and so wonderfully constructed. This is a book that challenges and rewards at the same time. Just brilliant.)
#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 (I kept reading about how Emile Zola was supposed to have written such scandalous novels. Well, I found both Nana and Therese Raquin rather mild. Conceptually dangerous, but executed with such taste and class that I could not imagine being outraged by it.)
#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
Tally: 30 that I have read in their entirety. 16 that I have read in parts. Not bad. Not illicit-materials- smuggler calibre, but not bad.
Labels: Books
posted by gentleice the deptfordian at 4:10 PM
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