Banned Books

I was perusing the banned book lists floating around the internet this week. The last week of September is called something like Banned Book Week, and the ALA encourages us to get out there and read a banned book to celebrate our right to freedom of expression. This week-long celebration began in the early 80s, with a list of now-deemed classic literature which was at one time banned from schools libraries.

Here is a list of some of those titles:

• 1984 - George Orwell
  
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) - Mark Twain
• Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
• Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
• Andersonville (1955) - MacKinlay Kantor
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• Arabian Nights
• As I Lay Dying (1932) - William Faulkner
• Awakening - Kate Chopin
• Beloved - Toni Morrison
  
• Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
• Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo A. Anaya
• Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Call of the Wild - Jack London
• Can Such Things Be? - Ambrose Bierce
• Candide - Voltaire
• Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
• Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
• Catcher in the Rye (1951) - J. D. Salinger
  
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
• Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau
• Color Purple - Alice Walker
• Confessions - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
• Decameron - Boccaccio
• Dubliners - James Joyce
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• Fanny Hill - John Cleland
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
• Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
• Grapes of Wrath (1939) - John Steinbeck
• Hamlet - William Shakespeare
• Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
• House of Spirits - Isabel Allende
• Howl - Allen Ginsberg
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
• Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
• Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
• King Lear - William Shakespeare
• Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
• Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
• Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• Lysistrata - Aristophanes
• Macbeth - William Shakespeare
• Madame Bovary
• Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
• Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
• Monk - Matthew Lewis
• Native Son - Richard Wright
• Nigger of the Narcissus - Joseph Conrad
• Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
• Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
• Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin
• Passage to India
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969) - Philip Roth
• Rights of Man - Thomas Paine
• Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
• Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Separate Peace - John Knowles
• Silas Marner - George Eliot
• Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
• Sons & Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
• Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
• Ulysses - James Joyce
• Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

I have read quite a few of the titles listed above. And there are some titles I don't want to read. I looked at the top ten titles on the 2008 list of most-challenged books (out of 513 books challenged) and none of them sound like an appealing read to me. Maybe my grandkids (if I ever have any) will one day roll their eyes at me for my reading tastes. I don't lean toward violence, anti-religious, the occult, suicide and offensive language.

There are a lot of good books out there for me to read - (most recently I enjoyed The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.) I agree with the ALA and the other groups that sponsor Banned Book Week (American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Association of College Stores)
that we should celebrate our freedoms. But I feel like celebrating pleasurable reading - titles I would offer to my elderly lady friend at church as well as to the teenager down the road.