Category: book Nook
I saw this list on an email group that I am subscribed to and thought I'd post. Some of the books on this list really surprised me.
#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 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò 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 Misérables 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 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 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 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 Diary 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 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#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
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#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
#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
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#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
#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
#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
Anyhow, thoughts? Quips? Quandaries? I have read a few books on this list when I was in high school and a few years after.
Hugs,
Meka
I, too, have read many of these books. why would they be banned?
Are these books that were banned somewhere, are banned somewhere, or what? If said banning includes the former soviet union, then that accounts for the Bible.
Bob
These are books currently banned from US school libraries, just to clarify. Sorry if I didn't make that more clear.
Uhhh, did it happen to say why they're banned? I knew about books like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but...banning Little House on the Prairie? Granted, I think it's a mercy to the kids who don't have to read that book, but I don't see anything ban-worthy about it. And Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is a little kids' book. About a donkey. Who turns himself into a rock. By accident. Woo hoo. Oh, and I also knew about To Kill a Mockingbird, although I think that one's a shame. We read it in, I think, sophomore English. Good book. I still have yet to read Uncle tom's Cabin, although it was in our school's library, and I've heard mixed reviews about Black Like Me. And I'll stop now. Lol.
I posted in hopes of others knowing why some of these books were banned. You know, we can't have books that talk about kids turning in to rocks. Rocks are evil. honest.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird and saw the movie when I was a freshman in high school, and I read it on my own. At the time, I couldn't understand why the residential school said we couldn't read books that had descriptions of sex or strong language when it was perfectly alright for us to read Grapes of Wrath, which probably had more cursing and innuendo than I could shake a fist at.
Speaking of books that should have been banned, our library was filled with braille books, some of which were written in the 60's and 70's. I just so happened to find a book called "how to Get along with Black People", which was a support book for white people struggling to deal with integration. It had topics like 'what happens if a black person wants to be interviewed for your company?', 'What is the difference between black and white people, and how can we best deal with these changes when integration has been forced upon us?', 'What should I do if my daughter or son wants to play with a black child?' and my personal favorite 'If black people don't have the same superior education that white people have been blessed with, why should they be allowed to go to the same college as my son and daughter?'. Talk about being floored. I think I was in the eighth grade when I stumbled on to that book. Someone must have forgotten to take out all of the books after the school was integrated, and when I brought it to the librarian's attention, she didn't seem to see the problem with the book being there. I did read the book, but only because I wanted to find out the answer to those questions. I do think that it helped me to understand just how deep the waters of prejudice ran. While I don't think it was appropriate for it to be in the libraries, I am glad that I didn't stop myself from reading it, even if it was basically very well-written hate literature.
Hugs,
Meka
That's funny that you should find that book. I grew up during those times, and, though I never saw that sort of book, I can easily imagine people reading it. I'm sure the author was totally serious too, and thought he/she was offering sound cultural advice in times of change.
What did the author suggest if someone's child wanted to play with a child from a different race? Just curious.
Bob
wow, this is interesting. I really don't understand why some of these books would be banned from school libraries. Some of them, yes, I can understand, but there's quite a few in there that just don't make sense.
uhm wow? Multiple books on that list were *required reading during school for me.
This was also being discussed on a list I'm on. I can't remember who it was, but someone on there pointed out that it was rather ironic that Fahrenheit 451 was included in that list.
Ahhh! I came back to post that about Fahrenheit 451, but someone beat me to it. Lol.
I see that "the scarlet letter" made the top ten. It should have, it should be banned for b o r i n g. I hated that book in junior high.
I didn't check too closely, is "catcher in the rye" in there? if not it probably should be, just because of the language.
However, I don't believing in banning books except for their cultural worthlessness Ann Colter's books for example.
Bob
Awww, I love The Scarlet Letter. I wouldn't read it on a regular basis, the way I do some other books, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
As for Catcher in the Rye, yes, it's on the list. I completely understand the banning of that one, although I think it's sad, because I love that book. Aside from its pointless ending, it's great. And I'd sell my soul for Holden Caulfield...almost.
I have read quite a few of the books on that list, and several of them were required for English classes I took. Banning books is silly. If they don't get them from the school library, they're likely to come across them somewhere else at some point. I think I've only read one book I think shouldn't have been in our library, and it was called The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Horrible stuff in that book. *Shudders*.
The best way to get a young person to read a book is to bann it. I had an english teacher in high school who got me to read "Tom Jones" just by telling me it was banned in some libraries.
Bob
Oh yes, I agree with you about "Catcher in the Rye". I loved that book, but first read it because someone mentioned that it had awful language in it: and I was off like a whiz to the library.
How does banning books help society at all, and especially banning fiction?
Bob: tsk-tsk-tsk. *Grins*. Whatever gets you to read, I suppose. I first read Catcher in the Rye because someone said it was about a crazy guy.
I don't really see how banning accomplishes any good either, but...it just goes back to the tired old censorship argument. I am not in favor of banning any books, whether horrible filth or otherwise. And some of the books on that list are really great books which I think everyone should read at some point. Not in elementary school, perhaps, but...ah well, I'll comfort myself with the idea that banning is the most effective way to get young people to read. Lol.
Meka. Radio 4 recently dramatised Madame Bovary and I liked it.
The book was banned for being a very honest account of the life of a unashamed prostitute. And if you take the books in the context of when they were written, it's understandable why they were banned. I agree with banning the koran and bible, they have caused so much hate and violence.
Was Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs ever banned?
I have heard why several of those books were banned, but did you know that because some parents don't want their kids reading Harry Potter, they, (the parents), try to ban them from school library shelves as well as the ones mentioned? That series has nothing to do with the devil, or Satan worship. It's just a great way to get kids who would rather play video games and watch television, to pick up a book and read. I mean, you don't see cars being replaced with broomsticks, or people materializing out of thin air. I think I speak for HP fans by saying parents, lighten up.
I personally think that nothing should be banned from libraries. Once you start limiting media, then that can carry on and grow. everyone deserves equal access to all reading materials.
I've read a lot of the books on this list, mostly for high school and college. However, some I've read on my own, and love dearly. I don't know why people would ban them from libraries. We live in a supposedly free country, so we should have access to whatever books we want. Stuff like this ticks me off! Second, some of this is nonfiction, and by banning them, we are cutting out a part of our history.