Now, I know I’ve talked about this before in a previous post, but it’s still something I don’t understand and well, it starts with ‘B’ which makes it a fitting topic for day 2 of the A-Z Challenge. Banned books. Every year , during the last week of September, the American Library Association celebrates Banned Book Week. This is an event which “celebrates the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.” And frankly, if we don’t have that, we don’t have much.
During this week, many libraries and booksellers hold events and you can go to the ALA website to see how you can get involved. Here’s a link.
Also, here’s a list of banned or challenged classics. Have a look. How many have you read? If you’ve read them, did you understand why people try to have them banned, or did you shake your head and think, “I guess everybody has an opinion and opinions are like, well, you know…everybody has one.”
What’s your opinion on banning books? Why are you for or against?
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- Howards End by E.M. Forster
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- Jazz by Toni Morrison
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
- Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- The Bostonians by Henry James
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
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7 users responded in this post
One can only hope that these were once on a banned list and are now off of it.
Winnie the Pooh?!?!?
Charlotte’s Web?!?!?
The Wind in the Willows?!?!?
Wizard of Oz?!?!?
All of which I read while still a child, I might add. As for whether I’m for or against banning – I’m Canadian, and there tends to be less grass-roots pressure to ban things here. Thank heaven!
On your list of classics, my husband is at this very moment reading Catcher in the Rye and keeps wondering what the whole uproar once was about it.
Other than the kids’ books, the only other books on this list I’ve read are:
Gone With the Wind
On the Road
The Old Man and the Sea
The War of the Worlds
Some of them I understand why they were banned at that time, others I think were just an obsene over reaction.
Why was the Wind in the Willows banned?
OK, I admit it. I just counted, and I have read 62 of these!
What a reading rebel I must be … or a lit major.
Linda Ann
I stopped by via the A to Z Challenge for April, and I invite you to visit my blogs at:
NICKERS AND INK – poetry, humor, inspiration and more
PRACTICALLY AT HOME – inspiration, humor and how-tos for family, home and garden, and more
THE MANE POINT – a haven for horse lovers
I’ve never been for banning books, regardless of content. It goes against the freedoms America was founded on. While I agree some books require parental intervention, and some on this list I’ve read and thought were plain awful, I would never expect them to be banned.
I’ve read about a third of these books. In fact, five of them are books we studied in school. Some of them I can see people not wanting to read, or even being a little offended, but banning? Some I can’t understand at all. Charlotte’s Web? Winnie the Pooh? Seriously.
Wow! So many of them I had to study in high school English classes. I have either read or know the story of about 2/3 of them.
I don’t think books should be banned, but read with discernment. Some of the banned books I just didn’t care for, and one in particular (a best seller), I didn’t think it was a particularly good story and wondered what all the hype was about. It has mature themes and controversial topics/characters.
Controversial topics are always ripe for talk of banning. As you know, I wrote my own controversial piece and have been met with mixed reviews even among my friends. It has never been published. Sometimes I think lack of publication is a form of book banning by those who want to dictate what they think the market will (or will not) support.
Some hot topics sell on the basis of their notoriety and how far they push the envelope of what is acceptable. Some are just third rails.
Some of the books mentioned, I just don’t get why.
From what I have read, the children’s books are banned by different groups and countries. I don’t think the USA has a USA Banned Book List like a State Department warning of countires you may visit. Don’t know if it is true but they say piglet offends some religeous/cultural groups. They say Russia has banned Winnie-the-Pooh too.
To each his own—If I am offended, I just don’t read it. I like it like that.
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