Books

To be Read Over

27 September 2005

Here is the deal, these are some 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. via This Blog will be Deleted by Tomorrow

  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 – Does one page count?
  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 Eyes 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 Terabinthia 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 (ditto)
  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 by Jean 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

Although a lot of those that I’ve read part of I studied at college, so read a chapter here and there, or started and then skipped to the notes about said book so I could discuss it enough for an essat

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7 Responses

  1. banzai cat says:
    28 September 2005 at 9:00 am

    Eeek. Talk about under-read. Out of 110 books, I've only read 7, dammit.

    And wow, Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" made it to the list?

  2. Anne says:
    28 September 2005 at 9:12 am

    One page of Candide?Was that at school or did you just hate it?
    ( It's a great book though – from what I remember…)

  3. Fence says:
    28 September 2005 at 10:06 am

    Well see, a book has to be popular enough to have people talking about it in order for it to be banned. So maybe you only read cool obscure books Banzai? Or maybe it is that this is probably an American list (though I'm not sure on that part)

    Anne, I started Candide with a reading group, but never managed to buy the book and was reading an online version. Although for not very long :) Simply because I'm not too fond of entire books on the web. Which is weird, cause I read loads online, and don't mind reading fiction and blogs and newspapers. think there is something about all that electronic text that sends me to sleep. I do have it in my library, so maybe I'll give it another go.

  4. Alan says:
    28 September 2005 at 11:26 am

    Hmmm… 24 all the way through… but wondering what James and the Giant Peach did to get banned? Or Little House On The Prairie for that matter???

    Incidentally – banzai cat – Stranger in a Strange Land wasn't banned so much as bowdlerised. When Heinlein submitted it the publishers felt they could not possibly get it past the obscenity laws of the time and cut over a hundred pages, which were only restored by Heinlein's wife after his death in the late eighties. If you haven't read the full version, go back and check it out.

  5. weenie says:
    28 September 2005 at 2:11 pm

    Only read 8 of them, with Animal Farm being the one I enjoyed most. A colleague of mine said he knew someone who'd read Mein Kampf five times. The guy was Jewish and wanted to understand the mind of Hitler… bit obsessed, I'd say!

  6. Heather says:
    28 September 2005 at 2:20 pm

    I'v read:

    Parts of the Bible
    Huck Finn
    Arabian Nights
    Tom Sawyer
    Gulliver's Travels
    The Canterbury Tales
    The Scarlet Letter
    Ann Frank
    Les Miserables
    Tess of the D’Urbervilles
    To Kill A Mockingbird
    Gone With the Wind
    Black Boy
    Little House on the Prairie!!

    I can see why the Bible, The Scarlet Letter, Ann Frank, and Black Boy might be banned, but I don't really see anything objectionable in any of these books. Ignorant people really annoy me. I guess if there is something to be learned from a book, by all means, lets ban it.

    Grumble. Hiss. Boo.

  7. Carl V. says:
    29 September 2005 at 5:40 pm

    This is pretty pitiful.

    I've read all of:

    Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
    Dracula by Bram Stoker (multiple times)
    Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
    Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
    Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
    Red Pony by John Steinbeck
    James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
    Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

    I've read most of The Bible.

    I've read some of:
    Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
    Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
    Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
    Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
    Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
    Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
    Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

    I have read several different books by many of the authors on the list, but evidently not their more controversial works.

ecnef