Banned books and the guilt behind the fear

Found this on some blog or other. Who can keep track? The idea is to highlight the banned books you've read from the following list and get an idea where you stand.

Intellectual Freedom is a huge part of my becoming a librarian, so these sorts of things fascinate me. If you haven't read any, or many, of the below please consider doing so. Don't let anyone dictate to you what you can and cannot read:

#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
#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 Terabithia 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
#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

I may not have the best average, but it's not the worst, either. I'm so into the concept of Intellectual Freedom; I ought to read more, and investigate the whys and wherefores of what made these books banned in the first place.

It's so disturbing knowing books are still banned in this century, still pulled off shelves and even occasionally burned. What's behind that is fear, fear in the deepest recesses of those protesting. They're afraid what's in the books lurks within themselves, that one day it will come out of them and they'll be embarrassed, or damned. It's too close to home, too penetrating into their souls. Fear comes from deep-seated guilt; I'm convinced of that.

Whatever the reason, there is no justification for the banning of books. For withholding some titles from young people who aren't willing to deal with the themes, maybe, but not saying "You can never read this book, thus I'm going to destroy it." That only raises curiosity, I hate to tell them. It can only backfire.

In this country there is Intellectual Freedom. Personal fear should never get in the way of that. It is inappropriate, and a downright crime against humanity.

The better way to deal with this is to use these controversial books as a means of opening up dialogues with children, if in fact it's children these ignorant people are most worried about (what they generally claim). It's also an opportunity for them to look into their own souls and find the source of the fear, and to deal with that.

Words are very powerful, that's true. They have the power to change the world. They should never, ever be stifled. We all have the right to express ourselves, even those who express hatred and extreme ignorance. All they accomplish is proving their own ignorance to the world, serving as an example of the worst side of human behavior, raising awareness evil is out there and we all need to keep fighting the good fight.

Encourage this good fight. Read a banned book. Exert your freedom. That's your right. Don't ever take it for granted, and don't let anyone take that away from you.

Comments

[Julie]

Nothing gets me more riled up than book banning. I think I'll put this list on my blog too. Thanks!

[Andi]

Ahh, I need to do this one. The height of my banned book reading came in my early 20s when I owned the Banned_Books yahoo group. We had a great time! I did a unit with my freshman college composition course last semester on censorship, freedom of speech, and intellectual freedom. We had a great time, and they came up with some wonderful writing.

[Lisa Damian]

One of my favorite bumber sticker logos: "I read banned books."

My average on this list is probably slightly below yours, but now I want to read more from the list. So many books, so little time. It also makes me want to re-read a few that I haven't read since I was a teenager.

[bellezza.mjs]

I've only read 25 of the 110 you listed, but it always shocks me that a.) anyone would even consider banning a book and b.) some of the titles that have been suggested for banning. I mean, Laura Ingalls Wilder? Give me a break!

[stu]

I've read quite a few of these, and I doubt banning them has had the desired effects in the places where they have been over the years. A related point is that in supposedly free countries, many of them are effectively banned by parents/educationalists, not on the grounds of preventing children from having to deal with 'adult' issues too early, but as a way of controlling the child's access to information, and so the attitudes they will have. They are so lacking in confidence in the validity of their own attitudes that they don't dare let anyone read the opposing view.