Banned Books

While I was writing a post for The Great Book Challenge, I was trying to find the title of a book I read when I was about 11 or 12 - I picked it up at the library from a display of "banned books". It was about a young boy who's older brother was part of the resistance movement in World War II. Except the boy and his brother were resisting the Allied forces, not the Axis powers. They maybe lived in the Netherlands or possibly in Scandinavia, but I can't remember and of course, I can't find the book. My mom read it too and then asked if I had any questions about - I remember it being a difficult book because there was discussion of suicide and war and people disappearing in the night, but my biggest question was why would anyone ban a book? Followed by a question along the lines of "War is stupid, no matter what side you're on. Is it bad that I felt bad for the family in the book (I think the kid's name started with A) even though they were on the "other" side?" [My mom's answers: Because people are scared and no, it's not bad to feel empathy for people on the "other" side of a war. It's still a war and it's still horrible no matter which side you're on]

If you happen to know what book I'm vaguely referring to, please tell me.

Anyway. In the course of my internet searching I did find this great list of the top 110 banned books - with instructions to bold books you've read, colour books you'd like to read and italicize books you've read part of.Except there are only 109 books on this list because #58 disappeared.

And we all know I like lists.

So here it goes. It looks like I've read 15, read part of 4, which leaves 89 that I've never picked up. And that reminds me that even though I have a degree in English, I have read pathetically few of the books that most people consider the "classics" and I'm not really sure how I managed to get my degree without reading them...oh well...something to work on I guess! I didn't colour any because I recognized most of the titles and there are some I definitely want to read and some that I feel like I should read...and so then pretty much all of the 89 that are left would be coloured...

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
9. The 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 Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. The 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. The 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. The Diary of Samuel Pepys 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. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
59. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
60. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
61. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
62. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
63. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
64. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
65. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
66. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
67. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
68. The Talmud
69. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
70. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
71. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
72. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
73. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
74. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
75. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
76. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
77. Popol Vuh
78. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
79. Satyricon by Petronius
80. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
81. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
82. Black Boy by Richard Wright
83. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
84. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
85. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
86. Metaphysics by Aristotle
87. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
88. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
89. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
90. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
91. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
92. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
93. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
94. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
95. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
97. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
98. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
99. Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
100. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
101. Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
102. Nana by Emile Zola
103. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
104. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
105. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
106. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
107. The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
108. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
109. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes