Its Banned Books Week and check out what google is doing....

[MazeRat7]

Explore Banned Books
To Kill a Mockingbird. Of Mice and Men. The Great Gatsby. 1984. It's hard to imagine a world without these extraordinary literary classics, but every year there are hundreds of attempts to remove great books from libraries and schools. In fact, according to the American Library Association, 42 of 100 books recognized by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as the best novels of the 20th century have been challenged or banned.

For more information about Banned Books Week (September 23rd-30th), visit http://www.ala.org/bbooks.

Is a book being challenged or banned in your community? The ALA can help you
do something about it.

Here is the link to the Google Books Page listing some top works that have been challenged over the years.

I was thinking about making some snarky comment about those groups/people/organizations that are doing this... but what is the point the list speaks for itself.

MZr7

[whistle]

1. Hey, what a great reference list of winter reading material

[nosillies]

2. My library has a "banned books" display, and what amazes me is how

tame some of the choices are. It was interesting to see what used to be considered controversial.

[acmejack]

8. What is amazing is how many were assigned reading when I was in HS

I went a small rural high school in Texas in the sixties! We were close to the University of Texas though so we had a lot of young teachers whose spouse were working on grad degrees. But even so...

[ikri]

3. That list is bizarre

1984 being banned for being pro-communist? Did the people who banned it even read it?
The Lord of the Rings banned for being Satanic? :shrug:

People need to get a life.

[triguy46]

12. There are other banned lists to choose from:

Try this one:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html

[OneBlueSky]

4. wonder how many banned books fearless leader has read . . .

there must be at least a few among those 60 tomes he's managed to plow through so far this year . . .

[valerief]

5. With this administration in place, it won't be long before the

Banned Books List is banned. The books will still be banned, but we won't *have the right to* know about the bans.

I'm still so creeped out over the lethal/non-lethal microwaves the Air Force wants to use on assemblies like protesters. I don't want to explode just because I'm protesting.

[azmouse]

6. I'm proud to say I've read most of the books on the list.

The people that would want these books banned have obviously never read them. They are all outstanding!

[triguy46]

11. I've read 22 of them!

[hfojvt]

15. nah, some of them suck

the Hemingway in particular. I understand "Gone with the Wind" is a defense of slavery. I could not finish Lolita and do not see alot of value in it. I have not read alot of the books on the list either, such as Beloved or the Richard Wright books, so I can't really defend them, although I had many of them in my store.

[azmouse]

18. Agreed with Hemingway.

His style is tough to work through but worth the effort.
Perhaps I should have said that I think all the books are worth at least the attempt to read.

[hfojvt]

22. I did not think the style was that hard

I remember "For whom the Bell tolls" and "A Farewell to Arms" as both being big books that I had no trouble getting through. Now, Nabokov - I tried to read Ada, but the dude just goes all over the place in a single sentence. I mean a dude cannot just walk into a room and see it and the people in it, the author has to weave in some partially told story about their aunt or where you can see clocks just like the one on the mantel that we so loved by the Napoleon wanna be's of the 1920s, etc., etc., etc.
Hemingway I found easy to read, but he just did not know how to end a story. So he usually contrives some unexpected disaster to hit them. "Everybody dies. The End" as it were.

A sample of Nabokov:

"The front door proved to be bolted and chained. He tried the glassed and grilled side door of a blue-garlanded gallery; it too, did not yield. Being still unaware that under the stairs an inconspicuous recess concealed an assortment of spare keys (some very old and anonymous, hanging from brass hooks) and communicated through a toolroom with a secluded part of the garden, Van wandered through several reception rooms in search of an obliging window. In a corner room he found, standing at a tall window, a young chambermaid whom he had glimpsed (and promised himself to investigate) on the preceding evening. She wore what his father termed with a semi-assumed leer 'soubret black and frissonet frill'; a tortoiseshell comb in her chestnut hair caught the amber light; the French window was open, and she was holding one hand, starred with a tiny aquamarine, rather high on the jamb as she looked at a sparrow that was hopping up the paved path toward the bit of baby-toed biscuit she had thrown to him. Her cameo profile, her cute pink nostril, her long, French, lily-white neck, the outline, both full and frail, of her figure (male lust does not go very far for descriptive felicities!), and especially the savage sense of opportune license moved Van so robustly that he could not resist clasping the wrist of her raised tight-sleeved arm. Freeing it, and confirming by the coolness of her demeanor that she had sensed his approach, the girl turned her attractive, though almost eyebrowless, face toward him and asked him if he would like a cup of tea before breakfast. No. What was her name? Blanche - but Mlle Lariviere called her 'Cendrillon' because her stockings got so easily laddered, see, and because she broke and mislaid things, and confused flowers. His loose attire revealed his desire; this could not escape a girl's notice, even if color-blind, and as he drew up still closer, while looking for a suitable couch to take shape in some part of this magical manor - where any place, as in Casanova's remembrances could be dream-changed into a sequestered seraglio nook - she wiggled out of his reach completely and delivered a little soliloquy in her soft Ladoran French: ..."

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein.

It's been banned. Series.

[TechBear_Seattle]

9. "SMUT!" by Tom Lehrer

Not one of his better known works, but one of my favorites. All of the titles he mentions are, in fact, books that have been banned at some point for being obscene.

- cut -

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)

I thrill
To any book like Fanny Hill,
And I suppose I always will,
If it is swill
And really fil
thy.

Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
But now they're trying to take it all
away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand
we fight for freedom of the press.

- cut -

Full lyrics at http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/the_year.html#smut

[TahitiNut]

10. "Burned in Nazi bonfires"

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser


I'm willing to bet these aren't on Dumbya's reading list.

[hfojvt]

20. I do not mind seeing either of those Hemingway novels burned

since I have read both of them. Good stories, just really, really bad endings. Oh wait, "The Sun Also Rises" was kinda so-so, I was thinking of "For whom the bell tolls". Burn it! Burn it!

Funny, but the google list shows "Call of the Wild" by James Baldwin, and I have never read that one, if it exists.

Books like "The Story of O" or by Harold Robbins or whatshisname who wrote the Gor books do not make the list only because most people have never heard of them and they already are not in most libraries, at least not school libraries. The same might be said of novels by Howard Fast or Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland - they have been de-facto banned by being ignored.

[The Wielding Truth]

13. Cool. Read the books that at one time or another denied. I like this idea.

:thumbsup: :kick:

[Elwood P Dowd]

14. Fahrenheit 451

Surprised that's not on some list to be banned.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

16. Weird conjunction...

of this post and the other post about the 1st grader and 9-11.

Hmm.

[ComerPerro]

17. and the real crime is most people blame liberals on these bannings

and political correctness (which, in my opinion, has never existed in practice and is a creation of the RW to fuel their backlash mentality that they need in order to thrive)

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

19. I don't know about that.

See post #16.

[newportdadde]

21. Google knows a lot about banning check out their relationship with China.