With everything that is going on this week, it would be a real shame not to remind ourselves that intellectual freedom must always be defended and to reminded ourselves of the great pleasures and solace of reading.
I am a voracious reader. It is not often when I don’t have reading material close by and is probably the biggest reason why I can seriously claim to have never been bored.
My parents are great readers. They, too, always have reading material close by and they passed on their fierce love of reading and of books. I learned to read early, because I badly wanted to be able to sit with them in the evening and turn the pages of these books. They taught me how to talk about books and information — especially how to value them both, how to be passionate about them, and how to look at them critically. The house is full of books — some quite scholarly as you might expect from 2 PhDs — and it was just fine to pick anything off of the shelve and delve in. The day that I was eligible to get my own library card was almost as momentous as the day I got my driver’s license. Both of my parents are political junkies and news and politics and other incendiary topics are actually welcome at the dinner table — just be able to keep up your end. As long as you can defend your points, it is fun and freewheeling — to this day I’ve friends who angle for invites to big deal dinners at my parents’ because it is such a wide-ranging and passionate conversation about just about anything.
Recently, I’ve seen people who are book-crazy called Biblio-Americans and I guess that includes me. My own book-craziness has gone quite off of the deep end, to collector-hood. I collect some authors, some Fine Press work and am finding it difficult to find a place for it all and difficult to resist adding to the collection. The non stop delivery of packages containing the latest acquisition is a running joke in my office.
But back to Banned Books — here are the most Challenged Books of the 21st Century. And this is the list of the Most Challenged Books of 1990s. Perhaps more interesting, Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Ulysses, James Joyce
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Native Son, Richard Wright
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
Women in Love, DH Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Just look at that list — some of the best works of art produced by humans and here in the 21st century there are still Americans who feel the puritanixal need to make sure that their neighbors read only what is approved. What do these lists say about us as a society? I’m always heartbroken that these lists even exist, how can it be more worthwhile to try to ban a book for the many rather than make sure the few you are responsible for are well educated and socialized enough and schooled in the values you want to deal with the material?
I can’t find any local Banned Books events (know of any?), but the Philadelphia Free Library has been having readings from Banned Books all week.
Take a look at those lists and tell us what your favorite Banned Book is.