Thursday, March 01, 2012

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

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