Banned Books Meme

[zana16]

So I got this from cosmorific and I've left most of her commentary intact cause it was teh funneh, except for the commentary in italics which is mine. Confused yet?

A list of the top 110 banned books in the US.
Bold the ones you've read, italicize the books you've read part of.

#1 The Bible (WTF?)
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Um. Missing the point much?)
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain ... the fuck? Huck Finn at least I knew why they banned it, even if I didn't agree)
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Didn't care much for this one either. Oh, teh angst! Oh, teh shunning! Oh, teh apparent inability to MOVE TO ANOTHER TOWN ALREADY YOU STUPID BINT. However, I suspect it was banned because it hit too close to home for some of the banners. Heh.)
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman


#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (Right. Because no one in the current administration is opportunistic, mercenary, or ethically variable at all. Suuuure.)
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Because of the sex bits, I'm sure. *sigh* Missing. The. Point.)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Dude. The part where she's dead and it's all sad and then all of a sudden the author ruins the mood by saying that she was beginning to putrefy? HILARIOUS.
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (Oh noez, they're dissing capitalism! Won't someone PLEASE think of the capitalists?!)
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Well, I've read the abridged version, and have no plans ever to read Hugo ever again thank you.
#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 (I reiterate: WTF?)
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (*rolleyes* Bet the drama club can't show Inherit the Wind, either.)
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell (Is anyone here surprised at the number of satirical books on the banned list? No, me neither.)
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Big Brother is banning you!)
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

#31 Analects by Confucius (Confucius say: bitch, please.)
#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 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I have no idea. The parts where he shoots up cocaine, perhaps?) My theory is that the potention for Holmes/Watson slash was too obvious.
#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 (Won't someone PLEASE think of the meat industry?!)
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (War is GOOD, boys and girls! The President says so!)
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (Right. Because communism totally didn't self-implode, and is therefore still a "threat.")
#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 So they have kids out of wedlock. They get smited for it, don't they? There's no satisfying some people.
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (HAHAHAHAHA. Oh, the irony. Oh wait, I forgot, irony is DEAD OMG, and we certainly can't have anything around contradicting THAT, can we?)

#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 (Somehow, I suspect they did not ban this on account of Kesey being a sexist pig.)
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Okay, which spoilsport told them what "Scheisskopf" means?)
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Another banning of which I approve. Shut up, Holden, you whiny little poseur.) I second this opinion.
#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 François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau (Good Lord. What on Earth did Rousseau do to piss these people off?)

#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson What?!
#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 God I hated this book.
#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 (WTF?!!!!!)
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#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 'Cause rape doesn't exist. Nope.
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (OMGWTFBBQ!) Honestly, I can't think of a single reason to ban this book. Not a one.
#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 (The HELL? I LOVED that book when I was a kid! Are these people on CRACK?)
#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 (Aww, pookie, did it strike a nerve? You poor widdle televangelist. *pets*) *snerk*
#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 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile 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
#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


My conclusion: censors are stupid.

Comments

[findmeakor.livejournal.com]

Quite interesting...especially because, surprisingly, I've read all or part of about half of those. 0_0

[zana16.livejournal.com]

It's my new goal to read most of them. If they pissed off the censors, I know I'll probably like them.

[findmeakor.livejournal.com]

Smart way to think. ;)

[fangtsu.livejournal.com]

And on a twist, I had to read some of thos "banned" books in school!

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

Ditto!

Animal Farm, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale... there's all the novels (that is, not Shakespeare which we also did) we did in grades 10-12.

[zana16.livejournal.com]

So did I. But my district banned Harry Potter. Weird, huh?

[fangtsu.livejournal.com]

The choice on which books to ban creeps me out.

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

...so they ban both Christian, Jewish and Muslim holy books, as well as philosophical works from many of the world's top philosophers (Hobbes, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, et al)?

....right. What do they teach kids in school then?

[zana16.livejournal.com]

In Texas public schools, I can honestly tell you that they don't teach much except how to BS and be good at taking standardized tests. Neither of these skills has come in handy since my highschool graduation, alas.

[stragoi.livejournal.com]

I have read all but
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
Nana by Émile Zola
And as noted above by the lovely Kali Kali, It was in school where most oheses were read. The ones that werent, I unabashfully enjoyed so there.
As a one time library science major, we were made very aware of the history of the bbl. Thank you for making others awares

[zana16.livejournal.com]

Handmaid's Tale and Tess of the D'Urbervilles are both social commentaries, so I'm not surprised they were banned. Black Like Me would be controversial in the "omg we can't admit that there is any prejudice whatsoever" circles. Zola wrote social commentaries, too. But Sylvester and the Magic Pebble? It's a kid's book. Is it the magic part? wtf.

[cosmorific.livejournal.com]

Aww, I'm flattered! *blushes*

I'm not the only one who's started using this as a To Read list, am I?

[stragoi.livejournal.com]

I think this is an awesome read list. I am trying to find those I have not read at local used bookstores

[littleshebear.livejournal.com]

Whaaa??? Are these banned? Or were they banned in the past or would people like to see them banned? I don't understand.

There's so much philosophy on this list, it's making my philosopher brain curl up and protest. :\

[zana16.livejournal.com]

Have been banned at certain points in the past, some are still banned, I think.

[littleshebear.livejournal.com]

Blimey. That's sorta scary.

[zana16.livejournal.com]

My school district banned Harry Potter, so I can't say I'm surprised. Just disappointed.