They burned the Library at Alexandria. They aren't getting mine.

[gridlore]

These are just a few of the many thousands of books that have been banned in various libraries and school districts in the US. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you've read part of, underline the ones you've wanted to read but haven't yet.

#1 The Bible (Yes, I've read the whole bloody thing. Twice.)
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights (I'm presuming this means The Thousand and One 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 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (excerpts in school)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables 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 (Because I had to. Gads, I hated that book.)
#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 (I've started it, and referenced it, but not sure if I want to read the whole thing. Typical tepid Victorian writing.)
#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 Das 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 (Started it, but soon lost interest.)
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (Hey, I was dating a Communist at the time.)
#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
#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 Francois 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 (Terrible writing. Simply awful.)
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 The 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 (A childhood favorite)
#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 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile 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
#111 Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
#112 Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
#113 Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
#114 Forever by Judy Blume (Don't laugh.)
#115 Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
#116 My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
#117 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
#118 The Giver by Lois Lowry
#119 It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
#120 Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
#121 Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
#122 The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
#123 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
#124 Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
#125 Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
#126 In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
#127 The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
#128 The Witches by Roald Dahl
#129 The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
#130 We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
#131 Final Exit by Derek Humphry
#132 What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
#133 Beloved by Toni Morrison
#134 A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
#135 Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
#136 Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
#137 Cujo by Stephen King
#138 The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
#139 What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
#140 Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
#141 Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
#142 Fade by Robert Cormier
#143 Guess What? by Mem Fox
#144 The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
#145 The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
#146 Carrie by Stephen King
#147 Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
#148 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
#149 Private Parts by Howard Stern
#150 Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford (Wait, somebody tried to ban this?)
#151 Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
#152 How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
#153 Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Comments

[kengr]

There are a gazillion editions of "The Arabian Nights". I lucked into a *complete* set of the Burton Translation (the footnotes alone are worth it) thru Publisher's Clearinghouse 30 years back. Private printing for the Burton Society. It's *ten* volumes, plus another *six* of "Supplemental Nights".

Fills an entire bookshelf in one of my bookcases.

And you should read some of the stuff that doesn't get into the "common" editions. :-)

[kengr]

Oh yeah, agree about Mein Kamp. Tried reading the copy in the junior high library. Bleah...

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" instead of the Gulag Archipelago. Seriously.

I was up at 36 read of the first 50, but the farther down the list I go the fewer I even recognize.

[dalen-talas.livejournal.com]

Agreed. It's more or less the "Archipelago" in a distilled form.

[murbin.livejournal.com]

The only reason I can think of a public school library banning Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is so the kids will only have the Moore film title in their heads.

Is there a source cite for this list? Not that I'm surprised that some idiot, somewhere, was "offended" by by anything on this list and felt the need to "protect the children." I'm just curious as to how this is being collected.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

It seems to be drawn from the American Library Association's list of frequently banned or challenged books (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm).

Interesting and frightening reading which includes the reason for the attempted censorship.

[murbin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.