Uh-oh, it’s another LiveJournal meme. Surf on if you’re not interested in gaining further insight into my questionable tastes and interests…

Still here? Oh, good, then let’s talk about banned books. What follows is a list of the 110 all-time banned books. Exactly what the term “all-time” means is open to interpretation, since the LiveJournaller I appropriated this from wasn’t sure who compiled the list or what criteria were used in choosing items for it. Nevertheless, these are books that at some point have gotten somebody’s ruffles in a bunch. The idea of this meme (presumably) is to demonstrate to all the world how enlightened, literate, countercultural, or just plain contrary you may be by showing how many of these you’ve read.

Book-banning — media censorship in general, actually — is one of those issues that are near and dear to my heart. Nothing sets me off like some self-righteous prat trying to tell me that people shouldn’t be reading, hearing or seeing something because they find it offensive, or because it contradicts their particular worldview, or because it simply makes them uncomfortable. The equation is simple: if you don’t like being uncomfortable, then don’t expose yourself to those things that give you the wiggins. I’m cool with someone not watching R-rated films or not reading particular books if they have good reasons for avoiding them. But I get very angry when someone starts to think I shouldn’t have access to the same material. After all, one person’s abomination is someone else’s work of heartbreaking beauty.

The thing I find really interesting about this booklist is how many of the items on it strike me as wholly inoffensive. Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent my whole life defining myself as an outsider in a very conservative culture, but I just don’t understand what could possibly cause some of these choices to have been banned. For example, I know Huckleberry Finn sets a lot of people off because of the frequent use of “the n-word,” but what’s wrong with Tom Sawyer? Or James and the Giant Peach, one of the few children’s books I still remember today? Or how about Little House on the Prairie? What could possibly have caused that book to be banned? I’ve never read it, but I know lots of little girls who have without losing their eyesight, and I’ve seen the classic (if rather syrupy) TV show, and I just can’t imagine what about this text could have provoked the anti-book types.

In any event, here’s the list. The titles I’ve read completely are in bold text, the ones I’ve read portions of are italicized, and the ones I’d like to read (or complete) are underlined.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. The 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. The Prince by Niccolo 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 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. The 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. A 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 (***There’s a funny story related to my exposure to this book, which occurred in a dorm room at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. Unfortunately, I think it’s one of those “you had to be there” stories…)
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchel
43. The 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 (***I actually have a complete, nine-volume edition of this monumental work, and I’d love to someday be able to say I’ve read the whole thing, but I don’t know when that may ever happen…)
48. The 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. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
59. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
60. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
61. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
62. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
63. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
64. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
65. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
66. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
67. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
68. The Talmud
69. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
70. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
71. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
72. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
73. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
74. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
75. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
76. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
77. Popol Vuh
78. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
79. Satyricon by Petronius
80. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
81. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
82. Black Boy by Richard Wright (**I think I’ve read this one; it may have been Wright’s Native Son, though. It was way back in high school, so it’s a bit hazy at this point…)
83. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
84. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
85. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
86. Metaphysics by Aristotle
87. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
88. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
89. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
90. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
91. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
92. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
93. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
94. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
95. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
97. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
98. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
99. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
100. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
101. Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
102. Nana by Emile Zola
103. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
104. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
105. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
106. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
107. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
108. The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
109. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

As I review the list, I’m proud to see that I’ve read quite a few of these titles… the benefits of a liberal education, I suppose. I also find it interesting that I have no interest whatsoever in Russian or French writers, something I didn’t really realize until I started marking the things I’d like to read. I don’t really know why I’m not interested in them, but I’m not. Another observation: I find I’d like to finish most of the pieces that I’ve only read parts of, but as always there is the question of finding the time. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?