List of 25 Banned Books

iLibrarian is one of my favorite blogs - they always have interesting or useful posts.

Last week they posted about a story from DegreeDirectory that lists the top 25 banned books people should read.

I've never really gotten in to banned books week, or read books just because someone else was trying to outlaw them. It seems so fundamentally un-American and undemocratic to me to feel you have the right to repress or discriminate against something just because you don't like it. So usually, book banning news just slides right by me, but since it's making national news, I gave it more attention.

In looking at this list, I noticed that the books that I've read I'd really enjoyed. Since I liked some banned books, it stands to reason I might enjoy others, so I am going to make a point of reading the rest of this list.

The full list (in alphabeticalish order) is below - check out the original post for descriptions and links to excerpts or full-text online.

1. A Day No Pigs Would Die, Robert Newton Peck
2. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
3. And Tango Makes Three, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
4. Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden
5. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Patterson
6. Candide, Voltaire
7. Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers
8. Fanny Hill, John Cleland
9. Forever, Judy Blume
10. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
11. Harry Potter (The Entire Series), J. K. Rowling
12. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
13. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
14. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
15. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
16. Silas Marner, George Eliot
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
18. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
19. The Arabian Nights
20. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
21. The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
22. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
23. The Giver, Lois Lowry
24. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
25. Ulysses, James Joyce

And of course, there's lots of other banned books resources online.

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Fight Tyranny: Read Banned Books

This year's Banned Books Week is September 29 - October 6.

Which is rather fortuitous timing, considering this week's attack on the freedom to read in Lewiston, Maine.

Librarians (and teachers and others) often make a big deal of Banned Books Week (BBW), and many people don't understand why. Who cares? No matter how hard groups fight to ban a book, anyone can always go to the local bookstore and buy it anyway, right?

The point is that everyone has the freedom to read whatever interests them. Once a small group is permitted to make decisions for the whole, and force their views on everyone, then this is no longer a free society.

So, during Banned Books Week - and every other week of the year - read what appeals to you. And be a better person for it.

For more information on banned books and Banned Books Week, here are a few good web resources:

• The American Library Association's Banned Books Week webpage
• The ALA's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books
• The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom's blog post containing BBW web badges (where the image above came from. I also liked this one: )
• Wikipedia's List of Banned Books

And: I know this is borderline immature (I draw my own borders), but, like the "Adult Books" sections of libraries, "BBW" also makes me giggle. Librarians often forget (or don't know), that our abbreviations and jargon sometimes also have other meanings.

banned, banned books, banned books week, bbw, censorship, freedom to read, libraries, library, public libraries, public library

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