Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Banned Books Week!

Not to get all serious on everyone, but I just found out from Jenn than this week is Banned Books Week! Go here to find out more. Then pick a few titles to read yourself and encourage others to read them too. Here are some of the banned or challenged books I have read in my life (many of them when I was still in grade school):

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
The Bible
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Deenie by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
MacBeth by William Shakespeare
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Not all of them have been banned in the US, and some haven't been banned in a long time. But actually, most of the books on the list were among the top banned or challenged books in this country between 1990 and 2004. And just in case you think more drastic forms of censorship are long gone, read here about book burning. Now that I'm all riled up, time to go start reading Ulysses by James Joyce, which was banned in the US until 1933.

1 comment:

Jules said...

wow! I'll go and reread Fahrenheit 451 and think about how people fear knowledge.