Happy Banned Books Week!
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.
Tags: Books
Just one???? I’ll have to think about it.
Off this list, my favorites are The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse Five and To Kill a Mockingbird. I can’t pretend to have read all or even most of these titles, but I’ve read a fair number.
The 21st century list included all of the Harry Potter series, which both of my daughters, now ages 14 and 11, have read repeatedly. Both appear to be mentally and physically well-adjusted.
“I’ll find some and I’ll bring ’em to ya!”
LOL!
We need to give you a time out now, anonone.
Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book. Cat’s Cradle is also one of my faves. I am proud to say that I have read about half of this list. Now I have a list for the next year (or so).
“Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”
Very clever, anonone!
The Great Gatsby and Gone With The Wind are sentimental picks since they were the first two books I read on that list. (and, no, I haven’t read them all!)
Huge Capote fan… so – if I’m forced to pick – In Cold Blood.
Not on the list – banned by the US government in WWII – Dalton Trumbo – Johnnie Got His Gun…
Forget the association with a certain rock video and check it out…
cassandra
On library cards….
I grew up in rural western Virginia. Our county library was about two blocks away, and was exactly two rooms large: a kids’ room and an adult’s room.
Got my first library card at age 6, and by 8 had read my way through everything of interest in the kids’ room. My mom went over and got me an adults’ library card.
One day the librarian objected to some of the books I was checking out as unsuitable for a 9 year old, and told me she wouldn’t give them to me. I went home and told mom.
She put down the ladle of the soup she’d been working on, told my older brother to watch it, and then marched two blocks down to the library. The strip she took off the librarian is still fairly famous in our small town.
Curiously, there are only two lines I actually remember from her diatribe:
“What part of he has an adult’s library privileges didn’t you understand?”
and
“You idiot, suppressing information is the first step toward reducing us all to peasants.”
So if any of you ever wondered how I got so warped, maybe that’s part of the reason.
The perfect week to be subversive….
1984. No contest.
But I have to say that my first thought was to quote George Carlin: “And ‘teats’ doesn’t belong on the list!”.
Steve — my parents went through something similar with the nuns that they sent me to everyday. They did not approve of my reading (or, misreading at the time) Man and Superman — my went to great pains to remind them their control over reading lists was limited to the required courses. It was painful.
I think that my favorites on this list would include As I Lay Dying, Invisible Man and All the Kings Men (naturally!)…..
Interestingly, the Church didn’t abolish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum until 1966.
Cassandra… I don’t know when you went to school but in many ways things were looser in the 1970s. My English teacher took us to a performance of Man and Superman in NYC… I read Nietzsche in the school library. We read D. H. Lawrence in class (although admittedly not “Lady Chatterley”)… I remember carrying around a collection of essays from 60s radicals like Berrigan, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, etc. Nobody batted an eye. And this was a Delaware Catholic school, in 1978. There was pretty much a pro-academic philosophy that all reading was good.
Catcher in the Rye, no contest.
Goodness, I loved some many of those books. My top five are:
Slaughterhouse Five
Song of Solomon
Tropic of Cancer
The Grapes of Wrath
Heart of Darkness
BTW, we should give Sarah Palin a big high-five. Because if it wasn’t for people like her, we wouldn’t have Banned Book Week.
I tried reading Satanic Verses back when they put out the fatwa on Rushdie, but I couldn’t figure out what was so objectionable. Was the guy turning into a monster in the attic supposed to be Mohammed? Just weird.
Oh, and having read most of the books on the list apart from Toni Morrison and DH Lawrence, I’d have to say the Lord of the Rings. I must have read the whole series about eight times. Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies were early favorites of mine too.
cassandra–you have been given two of the greatest gifts a child can receive….parents who love you…and parents who love to read. Your passion comes through with what has been transferred, instilled, and expected of you from them and we readers here are all the better for it. Not a cassandra post is made that isn’t weighty, researched, relevant, and pointed. Nothing is lost on you…and it is always great when you join the mix–the consummate fixed position, when remarks and tone can degenerate quickly to ridicule and cheap shots. DL is fortunate to have you…and it is my privilege you let this outsider post. Thanks for being so well read…and thanks to the folks who provided the opportunity. ( I would sign a certificate now..or hand over a plaque..so consider that virtually done…tee hee) And, on the subject of banning…I take it these lists include banning whether regionally, locally or under any circumstances….because some of them I wasn’t even aware of…except maybe a national ban on Rushdie, and Chatterly.
And then how about non P.C. books that were pulled, and have been rewritten to reflect a more PC spirit? Little Black Sambo, and the old Hardy Boys series come to mind…I’m sure there’s more. Is there a line to be drawn?
“And then how about non P.C. books that were pulled, and have been rewritten to reflect a more PC spirit?”
Oh, like that classic character from Huckleberry Finn, African-American Jim?
Nice post about Cassandra, Joanne. And seconded!
Thanks for your kind words, Joanne! And you aren’t an outsider by any means. Once you’ve been to a Drinking Liberally, you are in our posse forever. 😉
I don’t know much about the books that have been rewritten to meet other’s standards, but it looks to me that all of the books on the lists above were banned or challenged for PC reasons. It is just that the PC in this case does not always from from a politically liberal POV. Literature exists that reflects a very ugly past and it seems to me that that writing is an opportunity to learn about that ugly history — and, importantly, why those attitudes were wrong then and why they are still wrong. Provided, of course that you think those attitudes are wrong.
And Huckleberry Finn suffers from being taught too early in school (satire I think requires abit more knowledge and experience to recognize) and suffers from an entire society that doesn’t always “get” satire.
anon@13 — I went to Catholic high school in Maryland (Nancy Pelosi’s alma mater!) at the same time you did. The School Sisters of Notre Dame were just aggressive in their charge to form young minds. And they were accustomed to parents who did what they were told. They were NOT accustomed to parents who insisted on their own role in intellectual development.
I did receive an excellent education when I was there, to be fair.
Wow! I can’t believe A Separate Peace is on the list. I think I read that in 7th grade!
My fav would have to be 1984…which I read in…1984!