the banned books meme

[lagilman]

because it's a good excuse to make people look at books that have banned, if only to make them wonder why...

(from agamisu, this time)

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Read more. Convince others 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 In Middle English, even)
#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 (novel and novella)

Comments

[algor.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in why The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would've been banned...

[karistan.livejournal.com]

I'm dismayed that I've read so few books on the list. Bad Kari, No biscuit! I'll have to pick up a few this summer.

Forgive the lack of html. A programmer I'm not.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/karistan/23014.html

[vampry.livejournal.com]

Whyever is Sherlock Holmes banned?

*goes away, shaking head*

[algor.livejournal.com]

Most probably cocaine use.

banned books

[(Anonymous)]

Amazing the books on the list...sad. I was shocked at some of them--(why???)and suprised I had read so many of them in high school...

[neadods.livejournal.com]

...Little...House...on the...Prarie...? Whatinhell is bannable in that?

On the other hand, I recommend Tom Jones. It's a little slow for modern eyes, but nicely smutty. And better plotted than many expect.

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

James and the giant peach? WTF?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Oh, that one I know. It's because James resents his aunts, and not goose-stepping immediately to whatever an adult says is the sign of a disobedient, sinful child, don'tchaknow.

Seriously. I saw that on a far-right site once. James commits the sins of disobedience to authority and practicing in witchcraft (with whatever it is that makes the peach grow, I forget.) What creeped me out was that the site was insisting that the sin lay in James' resentment of how he was treated, not so much in his actions. In other words, they said that he committed a thought crime and that the book would lead other children into not doing, but possibly just thinking Bad Things Against Parents.

[dcpoff.livejournal.com]

Ummm, well.. I have read 31 of the list. (I am not nor ever was a lit major)

Where is the list from again?

It seems to have left of some very interesting works and added some that are hard to wrap my brain around. Little House was banned?! Sheesh.
Too many farm animals getting busy or what?! (Note to self: Read that one!)

Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi, Galileo Galilei for example.

And it seemed to leave off the Evil frenchman the Marquis de Sade, Everything he wrote was poison. I normally wouldnt vote to ban or burn but the Marquis is the (only) author to make that list. Perhaps he wasn't totally banned. Sorry to offend.

And what about the Harry Potter books? Half the publicity, hell most of the publicity came from attempting to ban that evil evil book. *lol

Hope I don't offend Meerkat with the burn comment. Only one author has made my list for that, and I aint no prude. Enough sidebar sorry. Who the hell cares what I think anyway.

DC

[lagilman]

Don't make the mistake of assuming only right wing nutjobs can ban a book. Some have gotten in trouble for being un-PC, as well.

(*rinses mouth to take stench of word out*. I'm all for sensitivity and tact, but not at the expense of historical accuracy and NEVER in place of common sense)

[lizatwhidbeynet.livejournal.com]

Sooo, who did compile the list? (it's my anonymous note earlier).

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

25 or so of them were some combination of books I read on Recommended Reading lists or had as required reading for classes, some in college, but most in public school E.g. All Quiet on the Western Front, A Separate Peace, Huckelberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Scarlett Letter, Les Miserables, Grapes of Wrath (I think), Animal Farm, 1984, Dubliners, A Farewell to Arms, Brave New World, The Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and As I Lay Dying I think were all things discussed in English classes I was in in junior high or high school, with the balance being things I read for college classes (Mein Kampf, one version of the Bible, Das Kapital) or for as Recommended Reading necessary for doing book reports on "pick X of these to read" (Tess of the d'Ubervilles and others). (A friend who works in big chain bookstore says that the summer reading list books really do good things for sales of books in the store she works in. It boggles me that it's something that is not endemic in other states, apparently. What, those other states are pro-paraliteracy and don't assign summer reading to students?!) Other books on the list I've read on my own or attempted to, for various reasons (Stranger in a Strange Land, Tom Jones, Flowers for Algernon, I tried to read The Handmaid's Tale and bounced off it,