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March 08, 2005

I Read Banned Books.

Finally, a meme I have an interest in. Stolen from Reinder's blog.

Below is a list of books that either are, or some point were, banned by various governments for various reasons. Books I've read are in bold. Books I've partially read are italicized. Commentary added where I feel the need for it.

#1 The Bible (All good little atheists have.)
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran (Ditto.)
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (Been meaning to get to this one.)
#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 (Oops.)
#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 (Didn't everyone get this one chucked at 'em in one high school English class or another?)
#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 (Why have I read all the OMG DYSTOPIAN FUTURE books on this list?)
#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 (Don't see what the fuss was about. Found it dull.)
#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 (Gotta get to this one.)
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (This one managed to fuck up my entire day when I was, like, ten.)
#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 (Who banned this?!)
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright (Pretty sure this was assigned to me at some point.)
#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 (WTF, the kiddie book about the donkey? Someone needs a hobby.)
#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 (...Yipes. Yeah, I remember this one.)
#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 (No thanks. Turned off of Heinlein forever by Starship Troopers. WATCH ME MAKE A NOVEL OUT OF MY POLI-SCI THESIS!!!)
#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

What, no Turner Diaries? I don't even get that one? Come ON, people.

All in all... Kinda anemic. Maybe I oughta cut back on the Discworld and Song of Ice and Fire novels.

Posted by Spike at March 8, 2005 02:53 AM

Comments

Re: Catcher in the Rye. Pretty much every guy I know says he totally identified with it and it was the most amazing book he ever read, and pretty much every girl I know either didn't like it or just kind of went 'meh'. I think it's just that kind of book.

The number of books I've read on this list has been increased exponentially by the two years of schooling I have thus far. Had no idea my reading list consisted of 80% previously-banned books.

Posted by Amy Gordon at March 8, 2005 03:38 AM
154.20.181.160

word on the street is that Sylvester & The Magic Pebble (one of my favs) was banned because the cops in it are pigs. oi.

and little house on the prairie? WHAT?

Posted by meredith at March 8, 2005 08:00 AM
151.205.87.201

I remember being in like...6th grade and hearing some book was banned. I went to the school library to find it and when I had it in my hands I lost all interest. I don't even emember what it was.

Bridge to Terabithia is the only book on there I remember reading that people's parent's complained about in school.

Posted by Psychomelody at March 8, 2005 10:24 AM
151.201.151.213

Heh, Discworld = awesome. But seriously? Of the above, I hereby advise you to skip Nos. 96, 74, and 14. They are tragically dull, and Young Werther is *such* a pussy, for reals. Also, 24? Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, NOBODY reads it. Get a cheapass used copy of Futuyma's "Evolutionary Biology" instead (if you don't already have one left over from your collegiate days).
That said, the following books fuckin' rock: Lolita (82), the Hemingways (34,48) , Gulag Arch./Ivan Denisovich (106 & 62; read the latter first- it's basically the Condensed Guide to Soviet Prison Camps), all the Steinbecks, all the Faulkners.
And I agree with Merideth above: *Little House on the Prairie*??? WTF? Was there, perhaps, too much ... churning? Dude.

Posted by Ainsley S at March 8, 2005 12:19 PM
128.32.85.90

Maybe Little House on the Prairie was banned for being incrediblly dull. It has the honor of being the first book I stopped reading because I found it boring.

Lolita is interesting, but if you know (or are related to) a girl in her pre-teens, it is way creepy.

The 'OMG DYSTOPIAN FUTURE' books are the most fun.

Posted by Brenna at March 8, 2005 02:24 PM
24.20.8.36

James and the Giant Peach: Probably the crushing of the Aunts, and wasn't there some curse words?

Posted by Kristin at March 8, 2005 03:57 PM
129.89.126.178

I will speak up for the SF geeks and point out that "Stranger in a Strange Land" is the polar opposite of "Starship Troopers" in just about every way. I think you might dig it.

Posted by Wagner at March 8, 2005 07:03 PM
66.68.108.122

I once owned a "I Read Banned Books" button that I picked up from the New York City Anti-Censorhip League. Sadly, it has gone missing. I wish I'd read more of the books on this list. I've got a Bible (thanks to teh Mormons) and a Koran.

I wonder why the hell Flowers for Algernon is on there. It's a perfectly fine book. Sure it deals with retardation, but it's not insulting or demeaning. It's good sci-fi, damn it!

Posted by Rich at March 8, 2005 09:38 PM
141.151.58.221

Flowers for Algernon is rather good. And try to read more Vonnegut, he's real good.

Posted by Mikhail Lvovsky at March 11, 2005 07:34 AM
209.158.113.69

i had to do a book report on "Bridge To Terabithia" and i found the Book quite interesting, i had reas it once in 6th grade now in 10th and i remembered none of it until i picked the book up and started reading, good book for morals.

Posted by Ashley at May 23, 2005 05:38 PM
205.188.116.195

Hey, if any one has more information on the novel Lolita, can you please write back to my email address... jelena_808@hotmail.com.... thanx :)

Posted by Jelena at January 5, 2006 12:16 AM
216.8.175.235

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