IS THIS WHAT WE WANT...A RETURN TO THE DARK AGES?
Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.
The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings. Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.
Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
*Titles in bold are the ones I have read
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
11. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
12. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
13. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
14. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
15. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
16. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
17. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
18. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
20. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
21. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22. Native Son by Richard Wright
23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
24. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
25. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
26. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
27. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
28. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
29. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
30. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
31. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
32. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
33. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
34. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
35. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
36. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
37. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
38. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
39. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
40. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
41. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
42. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
All information was obtained from ala.org
Happy (banned) Reading!
I can't decide which one to read this year.
ReplyDeleteSo many great titles and authors. I am making a pledge to try to keep in mind those books that have been either banned or challenged everytime I am book shopping.
ReplyDeleteI've read more of these than I thought and the ones that I haven't read don't necessarily appeal. I would totally read them in a second if they did!
ReplyDeleteThere are several more on this list I want to read. I own most of them so someday.... =o)
ReplyDelete