ALA: Most Challenged books

I've read 11 of those, and most of them, I can't see what all the banning fuss is about.

I've read the following from most banned classics complete list: I pasted and then deleted the ones I haven't read. I haven't counted yet. It hurts my eyes!  EDIT: Okay, I counted and I've read 60 out of the hundred.

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
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!)
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Neither do I! It's kooky!

i like that the golden compass books are on there.

To Kill a Mockingbird is on there!? I mean, I realize WHY it would be challenged, in theory, but that's one of the most widely-taught books in the American curriculum. To say that it's without merit because of its treatment of racial issues is redonk.

They should put Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code on there.

Nobody should ever read those books. There should be a "banned" list based on the quality of the material, not the nature of it.

Books should never, ever be banned.

Thank you!

oh please. at least people are reading. I hate that I'm dan brown's person defender, but I am!

What if a book about The Band got banned, and then there were great stacks of them in an abandoned school band room, tied together with rubber bands?

Books I've read from the list:

100 most frequently challenged books: 1990–1999

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
2. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
4. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
5. Forever, by Judy Blume
6. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
7. The Giver, by Lois Lowry
8. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
9. In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak
10. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
11. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
12. Blubber, by Judy Blume
13. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
14. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
15. The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton
16. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
17. Deenie, by Judy Blume
18. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
19. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
20. Harry Potter (Series), by J.K. Rowling (A couple of them, not the whole series)
21. Cujo, by Stephen King
22. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl
23. A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
24. Ordinary People, by Judith Guest
25. American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
26. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
27. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) I read only the first one.
    
28. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
31. Native Son by Richard Wright
32. The House of Spirits, by Isabel Allende
33. Jack, by A.M. Homes
34. Carrie, by Stephen King
35. The Dead Zone, by Stephen King
36. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
37. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
38. Where’s Waldo?, by Martin Hanford
39. That Was Then, This is Now, by S.E. Hinton

This time I numbered them to make it easy to count. What the fuck  is "Where's Waldo" doing on this list??

Indeed.

I've only read 5 of the top 25 from the first post, but I look forward to looking at the bigger list.

These lists are retarded with a capital 'Duuuhuuh I pissed muh-selve'. It's outrageous and sad when people have to be smitten at the expense of someone who needs to feel better because they didn't like what someone said. The fascist regime of hurt feelings. The medicine of oppression. Horse pills of horse-shit. Swallow 'em, baby. Make me feel better.

But really, Americans just love to be offended. It gives them a reason to have voice for about eight and a half minutes.

Wikipedia has a list of books banned in various countries with the reasoning for the ban.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_books

Whoa, reasons...

Some of the reasons for the bans are indeed hilarious.

Alice in Wonderland: Banned in the provice of Hunan, China (1931) for the portrayal of anthropomorphized animals acting on the same level as humans.

Dictionary of Modern Serbo-Croatian Language: Banned in Yugoslavia by court in 1966, at the request of Mirko Tepavac, because "some definitions can cause disturbance among citizens".

The Grapes of Wrath: . . . in the region of California in which it was partially set, it was banned because it made the residents of this region look bad.

The Metamorphosis: Banned by Nazis and Communists. (I like this one because it sounds like a joke punchline for some reason.)

Uncle Tom's Cabin: . . . In 1852, [it] banned in Russia under the reign of Nicholas I due to the idea of equality it presented, and for its "undermining religious ideals."

I mean, come on. It's lists like this that should teach us how innately ridiculous it is to ban books in the first place.

Wait wait wait... Winnie the Pooh?

And yeah, ditto for Where's Waldo. How do you ban Where's Waldo, and for what?

Where's Waldo books occasionally show topless women, in the beach pictures. And that is SCANDALOUS.

monkeywright wrote:

What if a book about The Band got banned, and then there were great stacks of them in an abandoned school band room, tied together with rubber bands?

I appreciate this so hard because The Band is one of my... well, favorite bands. Yeah. Levon Helms and Rick Danko melt my face off in Up On Cripple Creek.

I have read a lot of those books, and several more are next to me on my to be read pile. I would bet 75% of them are included in 1001 Books. Did anyone else notice that the 1990-99 books are mostly for kids? I mean, I have read a ton of them and almost all in middle school or before. Seems to me a bunch of parents have too much time on their hands and like to worry about the exposure of their children to life, literature, and the imagination.

Our 3rd grade teacher read "Charlotte's Web" to us in class as a reward on days when we had been good. "Gone With The Wind" was literally right next to the family bible in my great-aunt's house. My grandmother introduced me to Kahlil Gibran, who apparently was banned in some countries. I love book bans. How else am I going to know what to read?

littlemissmcrapey wrote:

monkeywright wrote:

What if a book about The Band got banned, and then there were great stacks of them in an abandoned school band room, tied together with rubber bands?

I appreciate this so hard because The Band is one of my... well, favorite bands. Yeah. Levon Helms and Rick Danko melt my face off in Up On Cripple Creek.

I fucking love The Band, passionately.

Up On Cripple Creek live at the Last Waltz, god, I would
marry that!

That Winnie-the-Pooh sure is a risqué piece of literature!

Nah, apparently it was banned because "Piglet offended Muslims, and Winnie The Pooh was among the possessions of a political extremist, and the Russian government deemed that it could be used as code and banned it there".

Love this, stealing it.

jane,
be my guest. every time someone steals one of my lines I am that much closer to achieving immortality.